After their separation, the girl at Mr. Mather's house could never have accomplished single-handed what is ascribed to her. The internal evidence of the narrative of events which transpired there combines with common sense in pronouncing it farcical--distinctly _farcical_--to regard that young girl as the contriver and performer of all the works and pranks which history says transpired through her physical organism, and, therefore, to external eyes, seemed to be products of her own volitions. The nature, quality, and extent of those performances bespeak producing powers both different from and greater than such a girl possessed; bespeak just such powers as departed spirits are now putting forth all around us through living human forms. It is not only at first, but _permanently_ incredible, "that a mere child could carry on such a complex piece of fraud and imposture as that enacted" through "the little girl whose achievements have been immortalized by the famous author of the Magnalia;" and therefore the world demands, and will yet obtain, a simpler, more rational, and more satisfactory solution of this and kindred cases; solution that will admit all the amazing feats of witchcraft to be embraced within the scope of forces that finite human beings, the seen and the unseen in conjunction, could in the past and can now so apply as to execute all the world's marvels without aid from either the One Great Devil, from fraud, or from imposture. Neither of these need ever have any connection whatever with, or complicity in, such matters. The records teach, and man's recent experience divines, that other, more befitting, and more competent actors than mere children were on hand and at work in Cotton Mather's presence. Though justice would have us assign to any Great Dull his honest dues, it also permits us to pull off from his sable brows any unearned wreaths which Cotton Mather and others credulously placed upon them. It also and especially requires us to tear off from the fair head of guileless Martha Goodwin that badge labeled _Fraud and Imposture_--that emblem of deviltry--which _modern delusion_ has most cruelly, and yet most artistically, wreathed around temples that seem worthy of a pure _martyr's honoring crown_. RETROSPECTION.