Perusal and study of her will and its appendages induced the later historian to speak of Ann Hibbins as "this recently bereaved widow"--a phrase much more agreeable, and seemingly vastly more just in application to her, than "miserable old woman." In that will she names as overseers and administrators of her estate, Captain Thomas Clarke, Lieutenant Edward Hutchinson, Lieutenant William Hudson, Ensign Joshua Scottow, and Cornet Peter Oliver; also in a codicil, she says, "I do earnestly desire my loving friends, Captain Johnson and Edward Rawson, to be added to the rest of the gentlemen mentioned as overseers of my will." Upham, having stated the above, says, "It can hardly be doubted that these persons--and they were all leading citizens--were known by her to be among her friends." Yes, the presumption is very fair, amounting to almost positive proof, that many of the prominent and best people of the town were her friends. The appearance is, that her social walk was wide away from the purlieus of common mundane diabolism and billingsgate. The vulgar would see her standing off beyond their reach, and waste no breath upon her. Only the respectable and influential could touch her to her essential harm. We commend and thank the later historian for bringing this persecuted woman out into such light as shows that she may have been equal in all good qualities to the best of her persecutors. But his reasons for her persecution and condemnation are scarcely more adequate or credible than those of Hutchinson. We ascribed to him the faculties of a fictionist, and he used them when he said, "The truth is, that the tongue of slander was let loose upon her." The former historian imputed certain offensive acts or traits to both Margaret Jones and Ann Hibbins severally, which he assumed to be the provoking causes of public vengeance. He deemed the sufferers themselves doers of the intolerable wrongs. But his successor makes her beneficence the crime for which Mrs. Jones suffered; and the origination and utterance of slander _by the public_, the cause of death to Mrs. Hibbins. The earlier writer was lenient toward the public and severe upon the accused women. The later was kind toward the women, but, by necessary implication, intensely aspersory upon the great body of the people; for he makes the public hang one because of her successful medical practice by the use of only simple remedies, and another because of slanders which itself had poured out upon her. His charge of slander is fictitious. He adduces no evidence that the lady was slandered, and we have met with none anywhere. And were it true, it is quite as much "beyond belief that even at that time a person could be condemned and executed merely on account of being" _slandered_, as it is that one could have then been thus treated on account of a "crabbed temper" solely.