Upham teaches that once, according to Mather, when people attempted to drag this girl up stairs, "the demons would pull her out of the people's hands, and _make her heavier_ than perhaps three times herself." Did the historian himself who quoted those words and let them appear to be accurately descriptive of facts, believe that they were such? Did he believe that _demons_ acted within her, held her back, and made her something like three times heavier than she normally was? Such things were adduced by him as being _facts_, and it would be pleasant to know whether he believed that the girl herself was those demons, and by her own action made her own body three times heavier than common gravitation would make it. Did such observable effects occur as Mather described? Probably they did, and the historian's process of accounting for them implies that by her own cunning, ingenuity, and histrionic skill, the child made herself three times heavier than she actually was. If the allegations were not in his estimation facts, why did he let them stand unaccounted for in his summary of things accomplished by his "cunning and ingenious child"? Perhaps he presumed that readers to-day are generally as ignorant as himself of the vast many cases in which the present generation has tested and proved by the best of Fairbanks's scales, that spirits augment or diminish the weight of material substances at pleasure, and to as great and sometimes greater extent than either demons or Martha Goodwin are alleged to have done in the case above cited. He perhaps presumed that the reading world at large was as ignorant and prejudiced as himself on this subject, and that the world's clearing and opening eyes will continue to see, as his glamoured ones did, only fibs in Mather's facts. This was a sad oversight. Light from Spiritualism (see Dr. Hare, Dr. Luther V. Bell, William Crookes, Alfred R. Wallace, and many others) has already substantiated facts which prove that nature infolds forces by which agents unseen can at their pleasure produce either levitation or increase of the weight of material objects. Therefore such action may have been put forth upon the body of Martha Goodwin. Yes, we now may _rationally_ believe that there existed too much sagacity and truth among the men of witchcraft times, and too little deviltry among the guileless children of that day, to permit that fictions and rhetoric shall long be suffered to malign our forefathers because they recorded true accounts of what transpired among them.