This no doubt came to the children’s knowledge; and their complaints immediately increased beyond what they had ever been before. As this relation is in print,[27] and but few persons have doubted that there was a preternatural agency in the case of these children, and [as] Mr. Baxter, in a preface to an edition published in London, says: “the evidence is so convincing that he must be a very obdurate Sadducee who will not believe,” I will spend a little more time in examining it, than otherwise I should think convenient. The eldest is after this the principal subject; and was taken into a minister’s[28] family, where for some days she behaved orderly, but after that suddenly fell into her fits. The relation chiefly consists of their being violently beaten by specters; put into red hot ovens, and their sweating and panting; having cold water thrown upon them, and then shivering; being roasted upon invisible spits; having their heads nailed to the floor, so as that they could hardly be pulled away; their joints first stiff and then limber; pins stuck into their flesh; choaked until they were black in the face; having the witches invisible chain upon them; dancing with a chair, like one riding on horseback; being able to read bad books, and blind if they looked into a good one; being drunk without anything to intoxicate. There is nothing in all this but what may be accounted for from craft and fraud, which children of that age are very capable of; or from agility of body, in which these children are exceeded by common tumblers much younger. There are some instances mentioned of another sort, namely: of their being tormented when any person took up a bible to look into it whilst the children were in the room, although their faces were another way, and they could not see it until it was laid aside; their telling of plate at the bottom of the well, which, it is said, they had never heard of before—and yet, in fact, plate had been lost there; of their eyes being put out when they were told to look to God, not only in English, but in Latin, Greek, or Hebrew; whereas from the Indian language no such effect followed, the Devil being said not to have understood that language[29]—all which serve only to evidence the inattention and the strong prejudice in favor of the children in those who were their observers. The strangest circumstance of all is that the children, after their return to their ordinary behavior, made profession of religion, and reckoned their affliction among the incentives to it. One of them was, many years after, one of my tenants, a grave, religious woman, [and] was never known to have made any confession of fraud, probably was never charged with it. But even all this is not miraculous.[30][31] The account of this affair being made public obtained general credit. At Salem was the next scene, and more tragical by far than any which had preceded.