done their work, if only in exciting terror, and the fire that consumed their tracts was to be a spark that lighted a great conflagration. When the General Court met, it passed a long and incendiary law against the coming of the Quakers, telling of their "divilish opinions," and providing for the fining and whipping of offenders. This did not keep away the detested sect, who believed that they were intrusted by God with a message to the world and would not be silenced. There were among them many devoted men; but there were yet more devoted women, and the second, like the first, "intrusion" of the Quakers was by women, Ann Burden and Mary Dyer. In August, 1657, arrived a pioneer in Mary Clark, who boldly proclaimed that she came with "a message from the Lord," and who found her welcome in the receipt of twenty stripes and banishment. Salem began to be known as a stronghold of the Quakers or at least of their admirers, and among others one Cassandra Southwick, an old woman, was imprisoned for sympathy extended to the Friends. Perhaps there was other reason as well, for under the date of March 9, 1660, we find that "Major Hawthorne, at dinner with the Gov. and Magistrates at a Court of Assistants, said that at Salem there was a woman, called Cassandra Southwick, that said she was greater than Moses, for Moses had seen God but twice, and his back, and she had seen Him three times, and face to face, instancing the places." Probably Cassandra--ominous name!--was a fanatic who had become insane from a sense of self-importance, as was too often the case with religious enthusiasts, and had made herself obnoxious to the powers of the colony by her claims. We hear no more of her after her imprisonment; but she too was typical of a certain phase of New England femininity in those days.