It is said that the moss-troopers of Connecticut were sorely disappointed; well for them that their belligerent cravings were not gratified, for, by my faith, whatever might have been the ultimate result of a conflict with all the powers of the east, in the interim the stomachful heroes of Pyquag would have been choked with their own onions, and all the border towns of Connecticut would have had such a scouring from the lion-hearted Peter and his robustious myrmidons, that I warrant me they would not have had the stomach to squat on the land, or invade the hen-roost of a Nederlander for a century to come.

But it was not merely the refusal of Massachusetts to join in their unholy crusade that confounded the councils of the league; for about this time broke out in the New England provinces the awful plague of witchcraft, which spread like pestilence through the land.  Such a howling abomination could not be suffered to remain long unnoticed; it soon excited the fiery indignation of those guardians of the commonwealth, who whilom had evinced such active benevolence in the conversion of Quakers and Anabaptists.  The grand council of the league publicly set their faces against the crime, and bloody laws were enacted against all “solem conversing or compacting with the devil by the way of conjuracion or the like."[44] Strict search, too, was made after witches, who were easily detected by devil’s pinches; by being able to weep but three tears, and those out of the left eye; and by having a most suspicious predilection for black cats and broomsticks!  What is particularly worthy of admiration is, that this terrible art, which has baffled the studies and researches of philosophers, astrologers, theurgists, and other sages, was chiefly confined to the most ignorant, decrepid, and ugly old women in the community, with scarce more brains than the broomsticks they rode upon.

When once an alarm is sounded, the public, who dearly love to be in a panic, are always ready to keep it up.  Raise but the cry of yellow fever, and immediately every headache, indigestion, and overflowing of the bile is pronounced the terrible epidemic; cry out mad dog, and every unlucky cur in the street is in jeopardy; so in the present instance, whoever was troubled with colic or lumbago was sure to be bewitched; and woe to any unlucky old woman living in the neighborhood.

It is incredible the number of offences that were detected, “for every one of which,” says the Reverend Cotton Mather, in that excellent work, the History of New England, “we have such a sufficient evidence, that no reasonable man in this whole country ever did question them; and it will be unreasonable to do it in any other."[45]

Indeed, that authentic and judicious historian, John Josselyn, gent., furnishes us with unquestionable facts on this subject.  “There are none,” observes he, “that beg in this country, but there be witches too many—­bottle-bellied witches and others, that produce many strange apparitions, if you will believe report, of a shallop at sea manned with women—­and of a ship and great red horse standing by the mainmast; the ship being in a small cove to the eastward vanished of a sudden,” etc.