bigoted, and unrelenting in his spirit toward the accused persons.
Something of this may be seen in Upham's volumes. One woman was brought
before him, whose husband has left a pathetic record of her suffering.
"She was forced to stand with her arms stretched out. I requested that I
might hold one of her hands, but it was declined me; then she desired me
to wipe the tears from her eyes, and the sweat from her face, which I
did; then she desired that she might lean herself on me, saying she
should faint. Justice Hathorne replied she had strength enough to
torment these persons, and she should have strength enough to stand. I
repeating something against their cruel proceedings, they commanded me
to be silent, or else I should be turned out of the room." [Footnote:
Chandler's American Criminal Trials, I. p. 85.] It is not strange that
this husband should have exclaimed, that God would take revenge upon his
wife's persecutors; and perhaps he was the very man whose curse was said
to have fallen upon the justice's posterity.

From this time, at all events, the family lost its commanding position
in Salem affairs. Justice Hathorne's son Joseph subsided into the quiet
of farm-life. The only notable association with his name is, that he
married Sarah Bowditch, a sister of the grandfather of the distinguished
mathematician, Nathaniel Bowditch. But it is in the beginning of the
eighteenth century that the Hathornes begin to appear as mariners. In
the very year of the justice's death, one Captain Ebenezer Hathorne
earned the gloomy celebrity attendant on bringing small-pox to Salem, in
his brig just arrived from the Barbadoes. Possibly, Justice John may
have died from this very infection; and if so, the curse would seem to
have worked with a peculiarly malign appropriateness, by making a member
of his own family the unwilling instrument of his end. By and by a
Captain Benjamin Hathorne is cast away and drowned on the coast, with
four other men. Perhaps it was his son, another Benjamin, who, in 1782,