The conclusive evidences which led to his commitment were spectral. His apparition had been seen by many, and had harmed them. Ann Putnam's sharp eyes were first in this case, as in most others, to see the witch. She saw this old man's apparition April 13; Mercy Lewis did on the 14th; and subsequently he was seen as a specter by, and gave annoyances to, eight other females and two males, who severally gave in depositions to that effect. Was their perception of him nothing more than the product of the imagination of the witnesses? Were all the declarations false? Possibly--but not probably; for both imagination and perjury are often charged with doing what clairvoyance legitimately sees and authorizes. He was examined April 19, five days after his apparition was first seen. Calef states that "Sept. 16th Giles Corey was prest to death." In a foot-note, p. 260 of _Salem Witchcraft_, we read that "Giles Corey was _executed_ Sept. 19, 1692, about noon." Perhaps these statements permit the conclusion that he was subjected to pressure from some hour of the 16th, Calef's date, till noon of the 19th, or about three days, when, according to Fowler, he died. "In pressing," Calef says, "his tongue being prest out of his mouth, the sheriff, with his cane, forced it in again when he was dying." Corey's endurance and call for "more weight," says Upham, ii. 340, "for a person of more than eighty-one years of age, must be allowed to have been a marvelous exhibition of prowess, illustrating, as strongly as anything in human history, the power of a resolute will over the utmost pain and agony of body, and demonstrating that Giles Corey was a man of heroic nerve, and of a spirit that could not be subdued." Hutchinson closes his account of this case with the remark that, "in all ages of the world, superstitious credulity has produced greater cruelty than is practiced among Hottentots, or other nations, whose belief of a deity is called in question." And why "_greater_ cruelty"? Nowhere outside of Christendom was so cruel a devil conceived of as within it. And therefore greater incitements to cruelty were called up in those fighting against his minions than in any other men anywhere at any time. The creed devil-ward, and not general "superstitious credulity," evoked in strong, good men, true to their ancestral and the _Christian_ world's faith, more than SAVAGE CRUELTY. REBECCA NURSE.