Goodyear asked Spencer if he wasn’t sorry that he had “denied the fact which seemed to be witnessed from heaven against him.” At this, Spencer said he was sorry and confessed that he had done it. At this, Goodyear apprehended “some relenting” in the prisoner and reminded him of the scriptural admonition, “He that hides his sin shall not prosper, but he that confesses and forsakes his sins shall find mercy” (Proverbs 28:13). Spencer was silent at first but then asked the magistrate whose sow it was. Goodyear then asked whether Spencer noticed his likeness in the piglet. Goodyear asked Spencer “if he had not committed that abominable filthiness with the sow.” Spencer denied it. The New Haven magistrates, however, committed him to prison “on strong probabilities of this fact.” That same evening, one of the magistrates, Stephen Goodyear went to the prison where he found Spencer talking with two other men. 24, Spencer was “examined concerning this abomination.” He understandably denied paternity of the deformed piglet. His other eye was deformed, “and his deformed eye being beheld and compared together with the eye of the monster, seemed to be as like as the eye in the glass to the eye in the face.”
Spencer, as it happened, had only one good eye. The most fateful attribute of the dead piglet, however, was a resemblance (or so it was thought) to one George Spencer, formerly a servant to Henry Browning, the man who had sold the sow to Wakeman.
0 kommentar(er)
