│ OFFICIAL │OFFICE OF SELECTMEN. │ SEAL. │ │GEO. W. TAYLOR, │ Selectmen of │H. A. C. WOODWARD, │ Lexington. │FRANK D. PEIRCE, │ LEXINGTON, MASS., Mar. 24, 1905. _Thomas Hamilton Murray, Esq., Sec’y of the American-Irish Historical Society, 36 Newbury St., Boston, Mass._ MY DEAR SIR: Your favor of the 22nd inst., relative to a patriotic pilgrimage of the American-Irish Historical Society on April 19th, is at hand. As Chairman of the Board of Selectmen, I shall be most happy to receive you at the Town Hall at noon, and will also be glad to attend your exercises on the Common, after which I should be pleased, if you find it convenient, to have you make an informal call at “Larchmont,” my home on Bedford Street, where I had the pleasure of meeting so many of your Society three years ago. Very truly yours, [Illustration: _Chairman, Board of Selectmen, Town of Lexington._ ] SOME INTERESTING HISTORICAL PAPERS. GOODY GLOVER, AN IRISH VICTIM OF THE WITCH CRAZE, BOSTON, MASS., 1688. BY HAROLD DIJON.[3] Leonard Scot, in his _Discoverie of Witchcraft_, gives this definition of a witch: “The sort of such as are said to be witches are women which be commonly old, lame, bleare-eied, pale, fowle, and full of wrinkles; poore, sullen, superstitious, and Papists; or such as know no religion.” Ralph Hoven, an Anglican divine, concedes: “All Papists be not witches, but commonly all witches be the spawn of the Pope.” The Rev. Josiah Templie, in a sermon preached at Rye in 1619, says: “Because of witchcraft we have divers mischiefs and disorders; and witches they be so long as there be Papists, drabs of the strumpet Pope,” and so on. Oates, in _The Witchcrafts of the Roman Jezebel_—a folio that brought him a considerable fortune,—repeats the foregoing statements in language not printable. John Cunliffe of Preston complained in 1596 that witchcraft was made a plea for “burning those of the Old Religion; in moste parte they who be in great povertie.” How many of those burned for witchcraft in England were Catholics, it is not impossible to ascertain. Much material appertaining to the subject waits to be investigated. The opinion fostered in England that a witch, a devil, and a Catholic were different terms for the same thing, was as sedulously cared for in New England; and we find Cotton Mather, in his _Magnalia_, and in a sermon preached in Old North Church, Boston, using virtually Scot’s definition of a witch to describe the subject of this sketch. “Glover,” he says, “was a scandalous old Irishwoman, very poor, a Roman Catholic and obstinate in idolatry.”