Page:Salem - a tale of the seventeenth century (IA taleseventeenth00derbrich).pdf/126

 "How did you go?"

"We ride upon sticks, and are there presently."

"Why did you not tell your master?"

"I was afraid. They said they would cut off my head if I told."

"Did you go through the trees, or over them?"

"We see nothing; but are there presently."

She also describes "a thing with a head like a woman, with two legs and wings;" and another "all hairy, but with only two legs, and going upright like a man."

But it is needless to continue these extracts any further. It seems strange, indeed, to us that at this senseless babble—which really appears too ridiculous to take pains to transcribe—grown men, of fair average common-sense and education, could ever have winced and shivered, and turned pale in shuddering horror as they listened; and yet it undoubtedly was so, for puerile and monstrous as it appears to us, it seems to have been fully conclusive to the mind of the learned court, for the prisoners were all three