Page:Salem - a tale of the seventeenth century (IA taleseventeenth00derbrich).pdf/152

 *ful and attractive manner: kind-hearted, single-minded, and free-spoken.

This worthy couple had brought up a large and exemplary family of children. They had four sons—Samuel, John, Francis, and Benjamin; and four daughters—Rebecca, married to Thomas Preston; Mary, the wife of John Tarbell; Elizabeth, the wife of William Russel; and Sarah, then unmarried, but afterward the wife of Michael Bowdon, of Marblehead.

Francis Nurse, senior, having by the united industry of himself and his children cleared off all the encumbrances upon his large estate, had apportioned it among his several children, reserving a homestead for himself; and his son Samuel, and his two sons-in-law, Thomas Preston and John Tarbell, had already established themselves there near their parents, having separate households and gardens upon the land thus conveyed to them by their father; and a happier, more united, or more respectable family can hardly be imagined than were the Nurses at the time the great delusion of witchcraft first broke out.

Thomas Preston, one of the sons-in-law, was