The author of the above was born fifty-five years after the execution of Mrs. Hibbins, and his account of her was not published till 1764, that is, one hundred and eight years after her decease. In his youth he may have conversed with aged people who were living at the time of the trial and execution of this woman, and may have received from them their notions concerning her temper and character. But if he did, his informers, during more than half a century before he was old enough to be an intelligent listener, had been living in the midst of people who were ashamed of the treatment which they and their fathers had bestowed upon reputed witches. Thus ashamed and yielding to an almost universal propensity in men to make their own imputed errors and crimes seem slight, trivial, and excusable as possible, nothing would be more natural than a general propensity to vilify the sufferers, under a mistaken, though common, notion that the vileness of the persecuted excuses the wrong of the persecutors. Whether Hutchinson, in his youth, received from any source special mental biases which inclined him to regard all who suffered for witchcraft as quarrelsome and vicious, cannot now be ascertained; but it is obvious from his epithets that his disposition let him very readily apply to such persons terms of very decided disparagement. He spoke of one Mary Oliver as "a poor wretch;" also of Mrs. Hibbins as "the miserable old woman," and specified the "natural crabbedness of her temper which made her turbulent and quarrelsome." He implies that such traits were both the grounds and the sum of the charge and proofs of her witchcraft, and does all this without adducing a particle of evidence that she possessed such a temper, or was either _turbulent_ or _quarrelsome_. His allegations seem like the offspring of either blinding contempt or of deluded fancy,--yes, _deluded_,--for surely clear-eyed fancy must have foreseen that after ages could never believe that the highest court in the colony found natural crabbedness of temper, and consequent turbulence, satisfactory proof of an explicit compact with the devil, and therefore punishable by death. The insufficiency and probable inaccuracy of his reasons for the arraignment and condemnation of this person, will be more clearly exhibited further on, and mainly in extracts from a later historian.