Nor was this an isolated case; on the contrary, it was the rule. So numerous grew the accusations that Sir William Phips, the first royal governor, appointed a special court to try cases of witchcraft, and nineteen in all suffered death upon such accusations as have been instanced. At last the girls made the mistake--whether or not instigated by Mrs. Putnam in these instances does not appear--of accusing persons who could not possibly be suspected of such practices, even allowing the possibility of the practices themselves. When they brought charges against the Rev. Samuel Willard, one of the most eminent divines of Boston, and Lady Phips, the wife of the governor, they were sharply rebuked; and when they added to their list the name of Mistress Hale, wife of the minister in Beverly and famous throughout the colony for her saintly character, they ranged against them the best of all the people of the country. Mr. Hale himself had been a believer in the accusations; but now, when their falsity was thus proved to him, he changed his allegiance and declared war against the perpetrators of the real crimes, as he now saw those accusations to be. This was practically the end of the insanity, and the death blow to the panic was given when some people of Andover, on being accused, brought action for defamation of character and thus removed the matter to its true tribunal. There were no more accusations after that. Some fourteen years afterward, one of the "Afflicted Children," Ann Putnam, who had been the most active of all, made public confession in the Salem church that she had been a cause of the shedding of innocent blood. She declared, however, that she had not acted "out of anger, malice, or ill-will to any person, for I had no such thing against one of them, but what I did was ignorantly, being deluded of Satan." This latter declaration has been generally interpreted to mean that Ann was even then, at the age of twenty-five, convinced that she had had actual communion with the powers of darkness--in other words, that she was a self-deceived seer of visions. The theory is open to doubt. Ann's words are at least susceptible of another interpretation; and, whether they were intended to bear this meaning or not, it may well be that she was "deluded of Satan" under the form of Mistress Ann Putnam, her mother. The complicity of Mr. Parris, the minister, is probable; but there is little doubt that the moving spirit of the conspiracy, after this had gained strength and purpose, was Mistress Ann Putnam. She was a brilliant woman in many ways, a fact which is not at all incompatible with the further fact that she was a moral degenerate, or at least a monomaniac. It is most probable that she directed the whole progress of the conspiracy, which at first arose in opportunity by the accident of the teaching of the old Indian woman and its effect upon some hysterical girls, who saw before them a chance to become notorious, and that she