After some time, Cotton Mather took her into his own family, to see whether he could not exorcise her.  His account of her conduct, while there, is highly amusing for its credulous simplicity.  The cunning and ingenious child seems to have taken great delight in perplexing and playing off her tricks upon the learned man.  Once he wished to say something in her presence, to a third person, which he did not intend she should understand.  He accordingly spoke in Latin.  But she had penetration enough to conjecture what he had said:  he was amazed.  He then tried Greek:  she was equally successful.  He next spoke in Hebrew:  she instantly detected the meaning.  At last he resorted to the Indian language, and that she pretended not to know.  He drew the conclusion that the evil being with whom she was in compact was acquainted familiarly with the Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, but not with the Indian tongue.

It is curious to notice how adroitly she fell into the line of his prejudices.  He handed her a book written by a Quaker, to which sect it is well known he was violently opposed:  she would read it off with great ease, rapidity, and pleasure.  A book written against the Quakers she could not read at all.  She could read Popish books, but could not decipher a syllable of the Assembly’s Catechism.  Dr. Mather was earnestly opposed to the order and liturgy of the Church of England.  The artful little girl worked with great success upon this prejudice.  She pretended to be very fond of the Book of Common Prayer, and called it her Bible.  It would relieve her of her sufferings, in a moment, to put it into her hands.  While she could not read a word of the Scriptures in the Bible, she could read them very easily in the Prayer-book; but she could not read the Lord’s Prayer even in this her favorite volume.  All these things went far to strengthen the conviction of Dr. Mather that she was in league with the Devil; for this was the only explanation that could be given to satisfy his mind of her partiality to the productions of Quakers, Catholics, and Episcopalians, and her aversion to the Bible and the Catechism.

She exhibited the most exquisite ingenuity in beguiling Dr. Mather by the force of a charm, the power of which he could not resist for a moment,—­flattery.  He thus describes, with a complacency but thinly concealed under the veil of affected modesty, the part she played, in order to give the impression—­which it was the great object of his ambition to make upon the public mind—­that the Devil stood in special fear of his presence:—­

“There then stood open the study of one belonging to the family, into which, entering, she stood immediately on her feet, and cried out, ’They are gone! they are gone!  They say that they cannot,—­God won’t let ’em come here!’ adding a reason for it which the owner of the study thought more kind than true; and she presently and perfectly came to herself, so that her whole discourse and carriage was altered into the greatest measure of sobriety.”

Upon quitting the study, “the demons” would instantly again take hold of her.  Mather continues the statement, by saying that some persons, wishing to try the experiment, had her brought “up into the study;” but he says that she at once became—­