The cunning Candy exulted in the efficacy of her charms, and all beholders thought her mistress had practised upon her ignorance, and Goody Hawks had to confess to save her life. About this time commeced the Andover tragedy; where as Cotton Mather says, was discovered the most horrid crew of witches that ever disgraced a New England town75 The wife of Joseph Ballard of Andover fell sick, and the town doctor finding her disease too stubborn for his art, advised her husband that she was bewitched. This practice was too common among the early Massachusetts physicians. The hint took with Ballard; and he forthwith sent men and horses to Salem village, and to the house of Mr. Parris, and brought to Andover old Tituba’s pupils Abagail Williams and Mary Walcot. When these came into the sick woman’s room, they said they could well enough see witch spectres hovering round her bed and person, but not being acquainted with any Andover people, they could not name the originals. Describe them says the husband; and they did so in language sufficiently vague to embrace half the women in the town;—and still fancy or malignity might select at pleasure; and fancy or malignity did select at pleasure and that most fatally, as the event will show. Dudley Bradstreet, son of the old patentee, was then the acting magistrate in Andover, and he granted a warrant against a number of women on this occasion and held the examination in the meeting house. After prayers by the Rev. Mr. Barnard, minister of the town, the women were brought in, and Abagail and Mary fell down in fits at the sight, as in time past at Salem; and when the prisoners laid hands on them, they rose up and said they were well. All the old experiments were tried with the old success; and Bradstreet committed a number of his towns-women to Salem prison, to answer there, and Abagail and Mary returned home with increased credit. Yet Goody Ballard died soon after of a fever; and Dudley Bradstreet repented of the step he had taken. Some of these in their weakness were made to confess the wildest witch pranks on record, and to implicate others as associates, by which more than forty Andover women were ensnared by witch prosecutions and some lost their lives. Here follow some of the recorded confessions of these Andover witches, long after drawn up, with death’s terrors before them. Ann Foster was one of these. She had been brought to acknowledge, in Salem prison, that she was a witch, and had attended a great witch sacrament at Salem village; that she rode thither on a pole, behind Martha Carrier, high through the air; that on their way the pole broke, and that she holding fast by Martha, came to the ground and was sorely bruised by the fall, but they mounted again and went on. Being asked what they eat, she said they carried their bread and cheese in their pockets, and ate it before the meeting began, sitting under a large tree, with the Andover76 company, and they drank water from a brook near by.