Afterwards, about half a mile from the aforesaid house, I was taken speechless for some short time.  My wife did ask me several questions, and desired me, that, if I could not speak, I should hold up my hand; which I did, and immediately I could speak as well as ever.  And, when we came to the way where Salem road cometh into Ipswich road, there I received another blow on my breast, which caused so much pain that I could not sit on my horse.  And, when I did alight off my horse, to my understanding, I saw a woman coming towards us about sixteen or twenty pole from us, but did not know who it was:  my wife could not see her.  When I did get up on my horse again, to my understanding, there stood a cow where I saw the woman.  After that, we went to Boston without any further molestation; but, after I came home again to Newbury, I was pinched and nipped by something invisible for some time:  but now, through God’s goodness to me, I am well again.—­Jurat in curia by both persons.”

Bayley and his wife were going to Boston on election week.  It was a good two days’ journey from Newbury, as the roads then were, and riding as they did.  According to the custom of the times, she was mounted on a pillion behind him.  They had probably passed the night at the house of Sergeant Thomas Putnam, with whom he was connected by marriage.  It was at the height of the witchcraft delirium.  Thomas Putnam’s house was the very focus of it.  There they had listened to highly wrought accounts of its wonders and terrors, had witnessed the amazing phenomena exhibited by Ann Putnam and Mercy Lewis, and their minds been filled with images of spectres of living witches, and ghosts of the dead.  They had seen with their own eyes the tortures of the girls under cruel diabolical influence, of which they had heard so much, and realized the dread outbreak of Satan and his agents upon the lives and souls of men.

They started the next morning on their way through the gloomy woods and over the solitary road.  It was known that they were to pass the house of John Procter, believed to be a chief resort of devilish spirits.  Oppressed with terror and awe, Bayley was on the watch, his heart in his mouth.  The moment he came in sight, his nervous agitation reached its climax; and he experienced the shock he describes.  When he came opposite to the house, to his horror there was Procter looking at him from the window, and Procter’s wife standing outside of the door.  He knew, that, in their proper persons and natural bodies, they were, at that moment, both of them, and had been, for six weeks, in irons, in one of the cells of the jail at Boston.  Bayley’s wife, from her position on the pillion behind him, had her face directed to the other side of the road.  He told her what he saw.  She looked round to the house, and could see nothing but a little maid at the door.  After one or two more fits of fright, he reached the Lynn road, had escaped from the infernal terrors of