Mr. Parris, who, by request from the magistrates, took minutes of the questions and responses at the trial of Mrs. Nurse, states that the tumult in court was very disturbing, and intimates that it was difficult to furnish a very reliable account of the transactions. Also Mrs. Nurse was quite deaf and otherwise infirm, so that it is doubtful whether she always correctly understood the questions put to her, or that she held her mental faculties under such control as enabled her to give pertinent answers at all times. She is reported as expressing belief that the accusing girls were "not acting against their wills." Therein, if she was correctly understood, she differed from the court and most beholders of the children. Then the court remarked, "If you think it is not unwillingly, but by design, you must look upon them as murderers." Probably all others made that inference, and yet the accused did not. She distinctly denied that she looked upon them as _murderers_, and only called them "distracted." Crazy, and yet voluntary, seems to have been the view she took of the girls; they were voluntary, but not responsible actors. Their own wills, guided by their own intellects in disordered condition, produced the fearful allegations. This was her charitable view. The power of human will to resist fits like those which the afflicted endured is brought up for consideration when we find enfeebled Mrs. Nurse afraid that visiting the suffering girls might induce recurrence of such fits as she "formerly used to have." She seems to have surmised the probable existence of such contagion in the air surrounding the sufferers as in her weak state she might be unable to ward off; and it is possible that memories of her own success when she was strong, in baffling fit-producers may have persuaded her that young persons possess power to withstand such operators, whether intelligent or merely physical, even though the old may not.