Mrs. Morse's possession of their secret was so unaccountable that the husband in astonishment asked, "Is she a witch or a cunning woman?" The question implies that it seemed so extraordinary to the man that she should have knowledge of the letter and its answer, that any process by which she could obtain it was seemingly beyond the power of mortals to apply. Either witchcraft or supernal cunning must have helped her. When asked by the same Mrs. Mirack afterward "_how_ she came to know it," the witness says, Mrs. Morse "told me she could not tell." This indicates a mind so conditioned, as many mediumistic ones now are, that knowledge is inflowed to them, they know not whence or how, and, literally, they _cannot_ tell whence it has come. This gives presumption that she possessed mediumistic receptivities, and the outworkings from such faculties would suggest that she received supernal aid. The only imagined source of such aid at that day was the devil. Obviously she "felt knowledge in her bones," as the acute negress did in Mrs. Stowe's "Minister's Wooing." Though Mrs. Morse was tried and condemned for witchcraft, the sentence was never put in execution. When on her way from Ipswich jail to Boston for trial, she said, among other things, that "she was accused about witchcraft, but that she was as clear of it as God in heaven." When saying this she probably spoke no more than exact truth. She appears to have been a good woman. The candid and generally cautious Rev. Mr. Hale, of Beverly, wrote that "her husband, who was esteemed a sincere and understanding Christian by those that knew him, desired some neighbor ministers, of whom I was one, to discourse with his wife, which we did; and her discourse _was very Christian_, and still pleaded her innocence as to that which was laid to her charge." This examination occurred after her discharge from prison. The aged couple came out from their severe ordeal with characters bright enough to claim the confidence and respect of good men in their own day, and may claim as much from after ages. There is no indication that the boy of the house, John Stiles, whom Powell accused as the great mischief-maker, was suspected of being such by any other one of the many witnesses of the strange transactions. Those witnesses were much better judges as to what persons the wonders apparently proceeded from, than any person can be to-day; and one whom they left unblamed, it is distinct injustice, as well as folly, for expounders of the case in our times to put forth and traduce as having been the contriver and performer of all that so agitated, distressed, and exposed the lives of those who sheltered, fed, and kindly cared for him. Modern historians, however, have been guilty of this great wrong.