When she saw two known persecutors talking, the circumstances may or may not have been helpful to a correct guess at the topic of their conversation _then_. But--but these men, Upham assumes, were _already_ known to her as her persecutors. Therefore something must have occurred before that time which had aroused persecution of her. These men are called "two of her persecutors," which intimates that she already may have had more than two, and admits the supposition that she may have had very many such, both prior to and at the very time when she made the particular _guess_ whose accuracy has been so plausibly commented upon. Something, antecedent to that guess, had set some minds against her. Yes, if we may trust the conjecture of Upham, something had already created an "excitement against her which was then the all-engrossing topic." The cause of antecedent and existing excitement, at the time she made _that_ guess, was seemingly unsought for by either Hutchinson or Upham. Or, if they sought for this, _the most important thing connected with the case, and essential to its satisfactory elucidation_, they found nothing which they ventured to publish. Omission to bring out the cause of public excitement, _prior to the guess_, makes previous history very unsatisfactory. There is some light shining now which may enable the searcher in dark closets of the past to discover meanings there which former explorers failed to find. No new, positive, distinct historical statements explanatory of this case have been seen. We are confined to the same very narrow premises on which previous reasoners stood, but we find different import of the same facts from any which prior expounders disclosed. We join with Upham in saying that "_the only clew_ we have to the kind of evidence bearing upon _the charge of witchcraft_ that brought this recently bereaved widow to so cruel and shameful a death, is in a letter written by a clergyman in Jamaica to Increase Mather in 1684." That letter, already quoted, imputes to her more _wit_ than others; wit, or penetration, by which she sensed correctly the conversation going on between two of her persecutors. That is the full sum of the direct historical evidence. And what is involved in that? Is crabbed temper there? No. Is slander there? No; but _wit_ is. Standing alone and unexplained, this wit amounts, perhaps, to but little; and yet when interpreted by her sad fate it may amount to very much. It suggests forcibly the probability, bordering close upon certainty, that she was endowed with some faculties which the sagacious Mr. Norton called "wit"--but yet were such as could obtain accurate knowledge so surprisingly as to suggest that it was obtained by process as occult as that by which Jesus perceived the private reasonings of scribes and pharisees--entrappers and persecutors of himself.