and pathways, is now a bare and rugged field, without a vestige of its former occupancy, except a few broken bricks that mark the site of the house.  The same is the case of the homestead of Jonathan Walcot.  It was in these two families that the affair began and was matured.  The spots where several others, who figured in the proceedings, lived, have ceased to be occupied; and the only signs of former habitation are hollows in the ground, fragments of pottery, and heaps of stones denoting the location of cellars and walls.  Here and there, where houses and other structures once stood, the blight still rests.

Some circumstances relating to the personal history of those who experienced the greatest misery during the prevalence of the dreadful fanaticism, and were left to mourn over its victims, have happened to be preserved in records and documents on file.  On the 30th of November, 1699, Margaret Jacobs was married to John Foster.  She belonged to Mr. Noyes’s parish; but the recollection of his agency in pushing on proceedings which carried in their train the execution of her aged grandfather, the exile of her father, the long imprisonment of her mother and herself, with the prospect of a violent and shameful death hanging over them every hour, and, above all, her own wretched abandonment of truth and conscience for a while, probably under his persuasion, made it impossible for her to think of being married by him.  Mr. Greene was known to sympathize with those who had suffered, and the couple went to the village to be united.  Some years afterwards, when the church of the Middle Precinct, now South Danvers, was organized, John and Margaret Foster, among the first, took their children there for baptism; and their descendants are numerous, in this neighborhood and elsewhere.  Margaret, the widow of John Willard, married William Towne.  Elizabeth, the widow of John Procter, married, subsequently to 1696, a person named Richards.  Edward Bishop, the husband of Bridget, a few years afterwards was appointed guardian of Susannah Mason, the only child of Christian, who was the only child of Bridget by her former husband Thomas Oliver.  Bishop seems to have invested the money of his ward in the lot at the extreme end of Forrester Street, where it connects with Essex Street, bounded by Forrester Street on the north and east, and Essex Street on the south.  This was the property of Susannah when she married John Becket, Jr.  Bishop appears to have continued his business of a sawyer to a very advanced age, and died in Salem, in 1705.

Sarah Nurse, about two years after her mother’s death, married Michael Bowden, of Marblehead; and they occupied her father’s house, in the town of Salem, of which he had retained the possession.  His family having thus all been married off, Francis Nurse gave up his homestead to his son Samuel, and divided his remaining property among his four sons and four daughters.  He made no formal deed or will, but drew up a paper, dated Dec. 4, 1694, describing