What had actually been accomplished on the spiritual
plane by the wholesale jail delivery of 1693 was a point
which at the time could only be described as moot. In
spite of the relief which many communities felt at the lift-
ing of the nightmare, the eagerness with which husbands
welcomed back their witches, repenting that they had ever
distrusted them, people farther removed from the scene
could look on the whole process as a monstrous miscar-
riage of justice, boding no good to the future of Massa-
chusetts. These agreed with Stoughton, "We were in a
way to have cleared the land of the witches. . . . Who
it is that obstructs the course of justice I know not."

It was true that some of the most obvious symptoms of
witchcraft were disappearing. Little was heard from the
afflicted girls once the jail delivery got under way. Though
logically the return of so many witches to civilian life
should have afflicted them even unto death, none of the
girls did die; they remained well enough. A few, notably
Mary Walcott and Elizabeth Booth, presently settled
down and got married. Some of the others, still manless,
and apparently at a loss how to put in their time in these
duller, flatter days, turned, it was rumored, to coarser
pleasures; certain of them, never explicitly named in his-
tory, went unmistakably bad.

In Salem Village where this development could be

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