[1] The painting may represent an event in 1692,[1] during the Salem witch trials, the subject being one Mary Fisher.

Whittier's entire quote follows: Cotton Mather attributes the plague of witchcraft in New England in about an equal degree to the Quakers and Indians.

The first of the sect who visited Boston, Ann Austin and Mary Fisher, the latter a young girl, were seized upon by Deputy Governor Bellingham in the absence of Gov.

Endicott, and shamefully stripped naked for the purpose of ascertaining whether they were witches, with the devil’s mark on them.

In 1662 Elizabeth Horton and Joan Broksop, two venerable preachers of the sect, were arrested in Boston, charged by Governor Endicott with being witches, and carried two days' journey into the woods, and left to the tender mercies of Indians and wolves.