Page:Weird Tales Volume 5 Number 6 (1925-06).djvu/130

Rh Subsequently, she swore, the shade of Mr. Burroughs suddenly appeared in her bedroom at dead of night, bringing along the ghosts of his two deceased wives as corroborative witnesses. They had turned their faces toward him and "looked very red and angry,” telling him he had been a very cruel man to them and that “they should be clothed with white robes in heaven when he should be cast into hell.” How typical this statement is of an imaginative child, fed from earliest infancy on ghost tales and the flint-hard doctrine of Knox and Calvin!

the briefest survey of the Burroughs case discloses the keenest competition among the juvenile witnesses as to who could tell the most outrageously fanciful tale. Take, for example, this statement of Mercy Lewis, as recorded by the Reverend Mr. Parris: “On the night of May 9 Burroughs carried me up to a high mountain and showed me all the kingdoms of the earth and told me he would give them all to me if I would write in his book, and if I would not he would throw me down and break my neck. I told him I would not write in his book if he threw me down on a hundred pitchforks."

Leaving out of consideration the fact that there is no “high mountain” near Salem, the modern reader may be puzzled to know how Mr. Burroughs, who was then lodged under double lock in Salem jail, could get out to convey the girl to the mountain top, how he could manage to disclose “all the kingdoms of the earth” to her from the eminence, and especially how he, a poor, obscure Colonial preacher, with most of his pitifully small salary still owed to him by his former congregation, could deliver her so much wealth. Also, it may be wondered why he did not attempt to make good his threat to break her neck when his munificent offer was refused.

But these questions seem not to have worried the court, for the child’s preposterous story was received with all due gravity and made a part of the judicial record.

The book referred to by the Lewis girl was, of course, the devil’s black book. In it were inscribed the Names of all those who acknowledged themselves Satan’s servants. By this acknowledgment they agreed to give the fiend their souls after death, and in return were granted certain supernatural powers which usually manifested themselves as ability to make neighbors’ stock sicken and die, cream refuse to churn into butter and hens fail to lay their customary number of eggs. A moment’s reflection, it would seem, should have warned the person intending to sign away his soul that the devil was getting decidedly the best of the bargain.

One other statement which sheds an interesting light on the public mind in 1692 appears in the records of this case. It is that of Abigail Williams, niece of the Reverend Samuel Parris and member of his household. It was not made in court, nor was it sworn to, yet it was duly received and preserved as a part of the court’s record.

Some time before Mr. Burroughs was brought back to Salem to stand trial, while he was still a hundred miles or so away in Maine, Abigail met Benjamin Hutchinson in the street and suddenly declared she saw Burroughs.

“Where?” demanded Hutchinson, for, naturally, he saw no one.

“There,” replied the child, pointing excitedly to a rut in the road.

Hutchinson was carrying a pitchfork over his shoulder, and, to pacify her, he flung the implement at the spot where she declared the clergyman stood. Thereupon (as was characteristic of the “afflicted children”)