Ebenezer Wheelwright 
The Salem Belle [EPUB ebook] 

In compliance with your request, I now send you a manuscript which contains all the material circumstances of a remarkable legend, founded on the singular events of 1692. The original chronicle is lost, but its general features were strongly impressed on my memory, and I committed them to writing, some years since, and very soon after the discovery that the first manuscript was missing. I hope you will be able to make such use of these materials, as shall expose the danger of popular delusions, and guard the public mind against their recurrence. It is too late to revive the folly of witchcraft, but other follies are pressing on the community, —fanaticism in various ways is moulding the public feeling into unnatural shapes, and shadowing forth a train of undefined evils, whose forms of mischief are yet to be developed. In this state of things, our true wisdom is to take counsel of the past, and not suffer ourselves to be led astray by bold and startling theories, which can only waste the mental energies, and make shipwreck of the mind itself on some fatal rock of superstition or infidelity.