Page:Weird Tales Volume 5 Number 3 (1925-03).djvu/76

Rh in a most unaccountable manner. Some of them would creep under chairs, tables or benches: others uttered strange and unintelligible words and cries; still others indulged in spasms and fainting fits, choosing the most public places to display their seizures.

Simple home remedies failing to relieve the children's strange illness, the village physician, a Dr. Griggs, was called in, and after making an exhaustive examination of the patients gave it as his opinion that they were bewitched. This was quite in accordance with medical ethics of the times, which permitted physicians to make the devil the excuse for their own inability to diagnose a case or effect a cure.

The devil was no laughing-stock in the seventeenth century. He was a very real and personal fiend, devoutly believed in by all who called themselves Christians, and was ever on the watch for some unwary soul. All the world was a sector on which the forces of good and evil contended unremittingly, and, just as God chose His ministers, so the devil chose his to further his work among men. Holy Scripture declared there were such things as witches, and it was man's bounden duty, as a good follower of the church, to kill off the wicked brood wherever found. So it was in Salem Village in 1692, and the doctor's announcement of witchcraft set the superstitious people afire. The "afflicted" children, differing not at all from children today, proceeded to make the most of their position in the public eye, and acted more outlandishly than before.

, Mr. Parris' own niece, rose in church one Sunday morning and shouted to her uncle, "Now stand up and name thy text!"

All eyes were turned on her in horrified amazement; but Mr. Parris, who had never before been known to let a slight to his ministerial dignity go unrebuked, looked mildly at her, and announced his sermon would be based on the eighteenth verse of the twenty-second chapter of the Book of Exodus: "Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live."

Sermons in those days were not gaged by the minute hand of the preacher's watch, but by the sands of an hour glass on the pulpit rail; and it was not till the glass had been twice reversed that Mr. Parris concluded his impassioned harangue. He traced the abominable crime of witchcraft from Biblical days to the founding of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, ever reverting to his text and urging the congregation to perform their religious duty and put all witches to death.

At the conclusion of his discourse the little church was filled with an hysterical mob, ready to turn upon any suspected person and execute him on the spot. And the excitement was raised to fever pitch when one of the "bewitched" girls suddenly rose to her feet and cried, "Look where she sits upon the beam!"

"Who? Who?" asked the congregation excitedly, for they, of course, saw no one seated on the ceiling beams.

Another girl, also eager to be noticed, rose with a wild shriek and exclaimed, "There is a yellow bird sitting on the minister's hat!"

"Where? Where?" the bewildered people cried, for the yellow bird was, naturally, as invisible to them as the witch on the cross-beams.

When meeting was over, the children's parents pressed them to name the wicked persons who had bewitched them. But here the girls became vague, contenting themselves with rolling their eyes, uttering terrified cries and pointing distractedly at terrible sights, visible only to themselves.