their faces, as if we made a part of the pale crowd that presses so
eagerly about them, yet shrinks back with such shuddering dread, leaving
an open passage betwixt a dense throng on either side. Listen to what
the people say.

There is old George Jacobs, known hereabouts, these sixty years, as a man
whom we thought upright in all his way of life, quiet, blameless,
a good husband before his pious wife was summoned from the evil to come,
and a good father to the children whom she left him. Ah! but when that
blessed woman went to heaven, George Jacobs's heart was empty, his hearth
lonely, his life broken tip; his children were married, and betook
themselves to habitations of their own; and Satan, in his wanderings up
and down, beheld this forlorn old man, to whom life was a sameness and a
weariness, and found the way to tempt him. So the miserable sinner was
prevailed with to mount into the air, and career among the clouds; and he
is proved to have been present at a witch-meeting as far off as Falmouth,
on the very same night that his next neighbors saw him, with his
rheumatic stoop, going in at his own door. There is John Willard, too;
an honest man we thought him, and so shrewd and active in his business,
so practical, so intent on every-day affairs, so constant at his little
place of trade, where he bartered English goods for Indian corn and all
kinds of country produce! How could such a man find time, or what could
put it into his mind, to leave his proper calling, and become a wizard?
It is a mystery, unless the Black Man tempted him with great heaps of
gold. See that aged couple,--a sad sight, truly,--John Proctor, and his
wife Elizabeth. If there were two old people in all the county of Essex
who seemed to have led a true Christian life, and to be treading
hopefully the little remnant of their earthly path, it was this very
pair. Yet have we heard it sworn, to the satisfaction of the worshipful
Chief-Justice Sewell, and all the court and jury, that Proctor and his