Young women had often at Salem, as elsewhere, troubled men, and for the misdemeanor had been condemned to the stocks—of marriage. But what to do with the ill-favored, old ladies who, in 1692, were accused of breaking the rest of both old and young,—of disturbing two organs, the spleen and gall, lying near that excitable old offender, the heart, and of stopping judicial digestion,—puzzled the brain of the wisest, yea, even the solid, well-set cerebrum of Cotton Mather. Much pondering was there, much exorcising, much studying of the twenty-eighth chapter of 1 Samuel, and diligent rummaging of chronicles, Jewish, Egyptian, French, and English, to find descriptions of the vice, and the punishments therefor. The sin of being old is, in a new country where young activities are alone valuable, always great. At quaint, gable-ended Salem it became a swinging crime. How the knot was eventually not cut, but tied, all the world knows. Everybody remembers how those aged agitators were taken around the neck, not by future spouses, as the young Salemites were, but by cords most unsilken. The delusion of course soon vanished with the twenty victims; but the Scarlet Letter, written at the time, which tells the affecting story, is still handed around unsealed, and will ever be read with witching interest. [Illustration: 1692.] [Illustration: 1869.] THE PENALTIES OF WITCHCRAFT. ’Tis the old tale, with new characters and scenery to adapt it to the time and place. The Bible opens with it. In that earliest recorded pomological convention, attended by only three delegates, Adam, Eve, and Satan, the deception by one of them—a model trickster, whose plan has since been often followed in other conventions—of the female delegate, who then brought over the third, led to a very wicked delusion, which has got a great many people in a very sad scrape. If woman was a witch in Paradise, what has she not been out? She has been “man’s familiar spirit” ever since, conjuring up visions before the eyes of young men, as stately as the sheeted form at Endor, or as pleasing as the walking figure of Bathsheba to the enamored eye of the Chief Singer. Samson could pull down the pillars of Gaza, but could not muster strength enough to open his eyes to Delilah’s illusions, or to raise his shorn head from her delightful pillow. Then there was that very fast woman, Herodias, who got a-head of John the Baptist on a charger. How she bewitched Herod by a pair of nimble heels!—a feat by which so many dancers have whirled reason from her throne, and men from theirs.