In all cases, the sage conclusion was received by nurses, and elderly women called in on such occasions, if the symptoms were out of the common course, or did not yield to the prescriptions these persons were in the habit of applying.  Very soon, the whole community became excited and alarmed to the highest degree.  All other topics were forgotten.  The only thing spoken or thought of was the terrible condition of the afflicted children in Mr. Parris’s house, or wherever, from time to time, the girls assembled.  They were the objects of universal compassion and wonder.  The people flocked from all quarters to witness their sufferings, and gaze with awe upon their convulsions.  Becoming objects of such notice, they were stimulated to vary and expand the manifestations of the extraordinary influence that was upon them.  They extended their operations beyond the houses of Mr. Parris, and the families to which they belonged, to public places; and their fits, exclamations, and outcries disturbed the exercises of prayer meetings, and the ordinary services of the congregation.  On one occasion, on the Lord’s Day, March 20th, when the singing of the psalm previous to the sermon was concluded, before the person preaching—­Mr. Lawson—­could come forward, Abigail Williams cried out, “Now stand up, and name your text.”  When he had read it, in a loud and insolent voice she exclaimed, “It’s a long text.”  In the midst of the discourse, Mrs. Pope broke in, “Now, there is enough of that.”  In the afternoon of the same day, while referring to the doctrine he had been expounding in the preceding service, Abigail Williams rudely ejaculated, “I know no doctrine you had.  If you did name one, I have forgot it.”  An aged member of the church was present, against whom a warrant on the charge of witchcraft had been procured the day before.  Being apprised of the proceeding, Abigail Williams spoke aloud, during the service, calling by name the person about to be apprehended, “Look where she sits upon the beam, sucking her yellow-bird betwixt her fingers.”  Ann Putnam, joining in, exclaimed, “There is a yellow-bird sitting on the minister’s hat, as it hangs on the pin in the pulpit.”  Mr. Lawson remarks, with much simplicity, that these things, occurring “in the time of public worship, did something interrupt me in my first prayer, being so unusual.”  But he braced himself up to the emergency, and went on with the service.  There is no intimation that Mr. Parris rebuked his niece for her disorderly behavior.  As at several other times, the people sitting near Ann Putnam had to lay hold of her to prevent her proceeding to greater extremities, and wholly breaking up the meeting.  The girls were supposed to be under an irresistible and supernatural impulse; and, instead of being severely punished, were looked upon with mingled pity, terror, and awe, and made objects of the greatest attention.  Of course, where members of the minister’s family were countenanced in such proceedings, during the