A Boston merchant, one Robert Calef, who knew Mrs. Glover, writes of her in _More Wonders of the Invisible World_, printed in London in 1700. The sympathy he expresses for her was bold for the time, prevented the publication of the work in Boston, brought on him the vituperations of Cotton Mather, and caused the book to be burned in Harvard College yard, by order of Harvard’s president, Dr. Increase Mather. Calef says: “Goody Glover was a despised, crazy, poor old woman, an Irish Catholic, who was tried for afflicting the Goodwin children. Her behavior at her trial was like that of one distracted. They did her cruel. The proof against her was wholly deficient. The jury brought her guilty. She was hung. She died a Catholic.” Drake, in his _Annals of Witchcraft in New England_, makes the following comment on this passage: “Glover was not a crazy person, as we now understand the word; it was not meant that she was insane, but simply that she was weak and infirm.” We have not lost the old meaning of the word; and such expressions as “a crazy table,” “a crazy structure,” are quite common.[4] Ann Glover [commonly called Goody Glover] and her daughter had been living in Boston for some years prior to her execution in 1688. It is not known what part of Ireland she came from. She herself has stated that she and her husband were sold to the Barbadoes in the time of Cromwell. She also related that, shortly after the birth of her daughter, her husband was “scored to death and did not give up his religion, which same I will hold to.” How Mrs. Glover came to be in Boston can only be conjectured. It is possible she came in that train of servants and Indian slaves brought to the Puritan Colony from the Barbadoes, some of whom fell to the Rev. Mr. Parris, of Salem fame. Little is known of her life in Boston before 1682, beyond the fact that the presence of a Catholic in a community that looked upon itself as “the only Christian people” gave great umbrage. In 1682 a woman who had labored in vain to convince Mrs. Glover of her “Papistical errors,” accused her of witchcraft; and, dying shortly after, prophesied that “Goody Glover would be hung.” The prophecy was not forgotten. The mother and daughter were wretchedly poor, and barely able to make a scant living by washing the clothes of such as could be induced to employ a “Papist.” Among those who employed them was the family of John Goodwin. John Goodwin had come to Boston from Charlestown, and was the father of four children—Nathaniel, Martha, John and Mercy,—all of whom were to be in the plot which did to death two harmless women, and which “sadly perplexed and befooled Cotton Mather.”