"There is in man a HIGHER than love of happiness: he can do without
happiness, and, instead thereof, find blessedness."—Sartor.
BOSTON:
HILLIARD, GRAY, AND COMPANY.
1840.
Entered according to act of Congress, in the year 1839,
BY HILLIARD, GRAY & CO.
in the clerk's office of the district court of Massachusetts.
The scenes and characters of this little tale are wholly fictitious. Itwill be found that the tragic interest that belongs to the history ofthe year 1692 has been very much softened in the following pages.
The object of the author has not been to write a tale of witchcraft, butto show how circumstances may unfold the inward strength of a timidwoman, so that she may at last be willing to die rather than yield tothe delusion that would have preserved her life.
If it is objected that the young and lovely are seldom accused of anywitchcraft except that of bewitching hearts, we answer, that of thosewho were actually accused, many were young; and those who maintained afirm integrity against the overwhelming power of the delusion of theperiod must have possessed an intellectual beauty which it would be vainto endeavor to portray.
This imperfect effort is submitted with much diffidence, to theindulgence of the courteous reader.
New England scenery is said to be deficient in romantic and poeticassociations. It is said that we have no ruins of ancient castles,frowning over our precipices; no time-worn abbeys and monasteries,mouldering away in neglected repose, in our valleys.
It is true that the grand and beautiful places in our natural sceneryare not marred by the monuments of an age of violence and wrong; and oursilent valleys retain no remnant of the abodes of self-indulgent andsuperstitious devotion; but the descendant of the Pilgrims finds, inmany of the fairest scenes of New England, some memento to carry backthe imagination to those heroic and self-sacrificing ancestors. His soulis warmed and elevated when he remembers that devoted company, who weresustained amid hardship and every privation, on the trackless ocean, andin the mysterious and appalling solitudes of the forest, by a firmdevotion to duty, and an all-pervading sense of the immediate presenceof God.
The faults of our ancestors were the faults of their age. It is not nowunderstood—and how wide from it was the conviction then!—that eventoleration implies intoleration. Who is to judge what opinions are to betolerated? He whom circumstance has invested at the moment with power?
The scene I wish to describe was on the borders of one of the interiorvillages of New England,—a mountain village, embosomed in high hills,from which the winter torrents, as they met in the plain, united to formone of those clear, sparkling rivers, in whose beautiful mirror thesurrounding hills were reflected. The stream, "winding at its own sweetwill," enclosed a smooth meadow. At the extremity of the meadow, andshadowed by the mountain, nestled one of the poorest farm-houses, orcottages, of the time.
It was black and old, apparently containing but two rooms and a garret.Attached to it were the common out-houses of the poorest farms: a shedf