"Who then was the 'witch' with whose execution Connecticut stepped into the dark shadow of persecution? She has been called Mary Johnson, but no Mary Johnson has been identified as this earliest victim. Whose is that pathetic figure shrinking in the twilight of that early record? We could think of her with no less kindly compassion could we give a name to the unhappy victim of the misread Word of God, who was led forth to a death stripped of dignity as of consolation: who to an ignorance and credulity, brought from an old world and not yet sifted out by the enlightenment and experience of a new, yielded up her perhaps miserable but unforfeited life. Here is the note which in all probability establishes the identity of the One of Windsor arraigned and executed as a witch--'May 26, 47 Alse Young was hanged.'" _"One Blank" of Windsor_ (Courant Literary Section, 12, 3, 1904), ANNIE ELIOT TRUMBULL. Matthew Grant came over with the Dorchester men from the Bay Colony in 1635, and settled in Windsor, Connecticut, where he lived until his death there in 1683. He was a land surveyor, and the town clerk, a close observer of men and their public and private affairs, and kept a careful record of current events in a "crabbed, eccentric but by no means entirely illegible hand" during the long years of his sojourn in the "Lord's Waste." It has been surmised for several years--but without confirmation--and credited by the highest authorities in Connecticut colonial history, and known only to one of them, that Grant's manuscript diary contained the significant historical note as to the fate of Alse Young. It waited two centuries and more for its true interpreter, as did Wolcott's cipher notes of Hooker's famous sermon, and there it is, "not made on the decorous pages which memorize the saints," Brookes, Hooker, Warham, Reyner, Hanford, and Huit, "but scrawled on the inside of the cover, where it might be the sinner might escape detection." In the publication of Grant's note Miss Trumbull has rendered a great service in the settlement of a disputed question, in the correction of errors, in fixing the priority of the outbreak between Massachusetts and Connecticut; and in the new light shining through this revelation stands Alse, glorified with the qualities of youth, of gentleness, of innocence; and the story of her going to the unholy sacrifice on that fateful May morning more than two and a half centuries ago is told with exquisite tenderness and pathos. Confirmation of the truth of Grant's entry is given by the scholarly historian of Windsor, Dr. Stiles, who says in his history of that ancient town: "We know that a John Youngs, [?] bought land in Windsor of William Hubbard in 1641--which he sold in 1649--and thereafter disappears from record. He may have been the husband or father of 'Achsah'[?] the witch; if so, it would be most natural that he and his family should leave Windsor." STILES' _History of Windsor_ (pp. 444-450).