Susan, Here's the next installment: >From The Devil in Massachusetts by Marion L. Starkey Pgs. 85 -87 "For Mary Warren's absence from court there had been sound reason. John Procter had after all made one convert to the cause of common sense, and it was the girl he called his "jade." Procter, a titan of a man, as commanding of figure as he was downright in manner, had long ago won the respect if not the love of his maidservant. Her affection, to be sure, did not extend to his present wife. Mary felt that Elizabeth did not understand her husband, that she was making his life miserable, an observation for which there may have been some grounds in that Elizabeth was currently suffering the first stages of pregnancy. Yet Mary was in the present crisis too loyal to her master to testify against his wife. Besides, good sense may impress a hypnoid subject as well as fantasy. Living at close quarters with Procter's sanity, Mary has well before the examination begun to emerge from her dream. Older than the other girls, serious in her pieties, she now looked about her and saw that she had fallen into strange company. The taking of Procter with Elizabeth gave Mary a kind of shock treatment which completely restored her sanity. She might in her secret heart rejoice to see the wife put away, but the husband, never. Besides, Mary, left at home with Procter's five children, was in a difficult position. The three older children were old enough to speak to her in plain terms for her part in bringing about such a misfortune, and their comments were reinforced by the opinion of the neighborhood at large. Procter had been a good neighbor; few who knew him either here or in his native Ipswich would believe ill of him. Other people might be witches, but not in the name of common sense John Procter. If this were not enough, Mary may have had another and extreme object lesson in the misery fantasy may bring into the world. Under the law witches were to be treated like enemy aliens found guilty of conspiring against the government under which they lived; not only their lives but their goods were forfeit. Neither, to be sure, could be taken before trial and conviction, but in Procter's case a zealous sheriff overlooked this technicality. Well before the trial he "came to their house and seized all the goods, provision and cattle that he could come at, and sold some of the cattle at half price and killed others and put them up for the West Indies; threw out the beer out of the barrel and carried away the barrel, emptied out a pot of broath and took away the pot and left nothing for the support of the children." The youngest of these were three and seven respectively. So suggestible a nature as Mary Warren's could not look on such events unmoved. Looking at the other girls with whom she had spent so many tranced hours, she now saw them as a pack of undisciplined children who had somehow beguiled an entire community into playing a wicked game with them, such a game as a five year old might invent. "It was for sport." One of them had admitted it and apropos of the Procters. Well, here was their sport, an orderly household suddenly deprived of its mainstays and little children weeping. If this was sport, Abigail Williams and Ann Putnam could have it. Mary Warren was through. Mary was not, however, of such stuff as heroines are made of. She did not at this point seek out Mr. Hathorne or the Reverend Samuel Parris to make a formal announcement of her change of heart. She might in the end as well as done so; she could not keep her views to herself, and what she confided to her friends presently reached the ears of the afflicted girls and immediately after, the magistrates." The "afflicted" girls were not about to let Mary Warren recant her testimony and leave their group. Mary soon found herself accused of tormenting the girls. A warrant was issued for her arrest and when she was brought into court Hathorne asked, "You were a little while ago an afflicted person; now you are an afflicter. How comes this to pass?" Mary, in fear for her life, eventually returned to the group of afflicted girls and again accused Elizabeth and John Proctor of witchcraft. More to follow.................Bonnie