The act of reversal of attainder, passed early in the next century, tells us that "some of the principal accusers and witnesses in those dark and severe prosecutions have since discovered themselves to be persons of profligate and vicious conversation;" and on no other authority we are assured that, "not without spot before, they became afterward abandoned to open vice." This was doubtless true of some; but of many it was not; and of this we shall have a word to say presently.
Mr. Parris' parsonage soon went to ruin, as did some of the dwellings of the "afflicted" children, who learned and practiced certain things in his house which he afterward pronounced to be arts of Satan, and declared to have been pursued without his knowledge and with the cognizance of only his servants (John and Tituba, the Indian and the negress). Barn, and well, and garden disappeared in a sorry tract of rough ground, and the dwelling became a mere handful of broken bricks. The narrative of the pastor's struggles and devices to retain his pulpit is very interesting; but they are not related to our object here; and all we need say is, that three sons and sons-in-law of Mrs. Nurse measured their strength against his, and, without having said an intemperate or superfluous word, or swerved from the strictest rules of congregational action, sent him out of the parish. He finally opined that "evil angels" had been permitted to tempt him and his coadjutors on either hand; he admitted that some mistakes had been made; and, said he, "I do humbly own this day, before the Lord and his people, that God has been righteously spitting in my face; and I desire to lie low under all this reproach," etc.; but the remonstrants could not again sit under his ministry, and his brethren in the Province did not pretend to exculpate him altogether. He buried his wife--against whom no record remains--and departed with his children, the eldest of whom, the playfellow of the "afflicted" children, he had sent away before she had taken harm in the "circle." He drifted from one small outlying congregation to another, neglected and poor, restless and untamed, though mortified, till he died in 1720. Mr. Noyes died somewhat earlier. He is believed not to have undergone much change, as to either his views or his temper. He was a kind-hearted and amiable man when nothing came in the way; but he could hold no terms with Satan; and in this he insisted to the last that he was right.