Tales and Sketches Part 10

"And well can he tell the very time To undertake his task When the pork-barrel's low he sits on the chine And drums on the empty cask.

"The wind is light, and the wave is white With the fleece of the flock that's near; Like the breath of the breeze he comes over the seas And faithfully leads them here.

"And now he 's pa.s.sed the bolted door Where the rusted horse-shoe clings; So carry the nets to the nearest sh.o.r.e, And take what the Shad Spirit brings."

The comparatively innocent nature and simple poetic beauty of this cla.s.s of superst.i.tions have doubtless often induced the moralist to hesitate in exposing their absurdity, and, like Burns in view of his national thistle, to:

"Turn the weeding hook aside And spare the symbol dear."

But the age has fairly outgrown them, and they are falling away by a natural process of exfoliation. The wonderland of childhood must henceforth be sought within the domains of truth. The strange facts of natural history, and the sweet mysteries of flowers and forests, and hills and waters, will profitably take the place of the fairy lore of the past, and poetry and romance still hold their accustomed seats in the circle of home, without bringing with them the evil spirits of credulity and untruth. Truth should be the first lesson of the child and the last aspiration of manhood; for it has been well said that the inquiry of truth, which is the lovemaking of it, the knowledge of truth, which is the presence of it, and the belief of truth, which is the enjoying of it, is the sovereign good of human nature.

MAGICIANS AND WITCH FOLK.

FASCINATION, saith Henry Cornelius Agrippa, in the fiftieth chapter of his first book on Occult Philosophy, "is a binding which comes of the spirit of the witch through the eyes of him that is bewitched, entering to his heart; for the eye being opened and intent upon any one, with a strong imagination doth dart its beams, which are the vehiculum of the spirit, into the eyes of him that is opposite to her; which tender spirit strikes his eyes, stirs up and wounds his heart, and infects his spirit. Whence Apuleius saith, 'Thy eyes, sliding down through my eyes into my inmost heart, stirreth up a most vehement burning.' And when eyes are reciprocally intent upon each other, and when rays are joined to rays, and lights to lights, then the spirit of the one is joined to that of the other; so are strong ligations made and vehement loves inflamed." Taking this definition of witchcraft, we sadly fear it is still practised to a very great extent among us. The best we can say of it is, that the business seems latterly to have fallen into younger hands; its victims do not appear to regard themselves as especial objects of compa.s.sion; and neither church nor state seems inclined to interfere with it.

As might be expected in a shrewd community like ours, attempts are not unfrequently made to speculate in the supernatural,--to "make gain of sooth-saying." In the autumn of last year a "wise woman" dreamed, or somnambulized, that a large sum of money, in gold and silver coin, lay buried in the centre of the great swamp in Poplin, New Hamps.h.i.+re; whereupon an immediate search was made for the precious metal. Under the bleak sky of November, in biting frost and sleet rain, some twenty or more grown men, graduates of our common schools, and liable, every mother's son of them, to be made deacons, squires, and general court members, and such other drill officers as may be requisite in the march of mind, might be seen delving in grim earnest, breaking the frozen earth, uprooting swamp-maples and hemlocks, and waking, with sledge and crowbar, unwonted echoes in a solitude which had heretofore only answered to the woodman's axe or the scream of the wild fowl. The snows of December put an end to their labors; but the yawning excavation still remains, a silent but somewhat expressive commentary upon the age of progress.

Still later, in one of our Atlantic cities, an attempt was made, partially at least, successful, to form a company for the purpose of digging for money in one of the desolate sand-keys of the West Indies.

It appears that some mesmerized "subject," in the course of one of those somnambulic voyages of discovery in which the traveller, like Satan in chaos,--

"O'er bog, o'er steep, through straight, rough, dense, or rare, With head, hands, wings, or feet, pursues his way, And swims, or sinks, or wades, or creeps, or flies,"--

while peering curiously into the earth's mysteries,chanced to have his eyes gladdened by the sight of a huge chest packed with Spanish coins, the spoil, doubtless, of some rich-freighted argosy, or Carthagena galleon, in the rare days of Queen Elizabeth's Christian buccaneers.

During the last quarter of a century, a colored woman in one of the villages on the southern border of New Hamps.h.i.+re has been consulted by hundreds of anxious inquirers into the future. Long experience in her profession has given her something of that ready estimate of character, that quick and keen appreciation of the capacity, habits, and wishes of her visitors, which so remarkably distinguished the late famous Madame Le Normand, of Paris; and if that old squalid sorceress, in her cramped Parisian attic, redolent of garlic and bestrewn with the greasy implements of sorry housewifery, was, as has been affirmed, consulted by such personages as the fair Josephine Beauharnois, and the "man of destiny," Napoleon himself, is it strange that the desire to lift the veil of the great mystery before us should overcome in some degree our peculiar and most republican prejudice against color, and reconcile us to the disagreeable necessity of looking at futurity through a black medium?

Some forty years ago, on the banks of the pleasant little creek separating Berwick, in Maine, from Somersworth, in New Hamps.h.i.+re, within sight of my mother's home, dwelt a plain, sedate member of the society of Friends, named Bantum. He pa.s.sed throughout a circle of several miles as a conjurer and skilful adept in the art of magic. To him resorted farmers who had lost their cattle, matrons whose household gear, silver spoons, and table-linen had been stolen, or young maidens whose lovers were absent; and the quiet, meek-spirited old man received them all kindly, put on his huge iron-rimmed spectacles, opened his "conjuring book," which my mother describes as a large clasped volume in strange language and black-letter type, and after due reflection and consideration gave the required answers without money and without price.

The curious old volume is still in the possession of the conjurer's family. Apparently inconsistent as was this practice of the black art with the simplicity and truthfulness of his religious profession, I have not been able to learn that he was ever subjected to censure on account of it. It may be that our modern conjurer defended himself on grounds similar to those a.s.sumed by the celebrated knight of Nettesheim, in the preface to his first Book of Magic: "Some," says he, "may crie oute that I teach forbidden arts, sow the seed of heresies, offend pious ears, and scandalize excellent wits; that I am a sorcerer, superst.i.tious and devilish, who indeed am a magician. To whom I answer, that a magician doth not among learned men signifie a sorcerer or one that is superst.i.tious or devilish, but a wise man, a priest, a prophet, and that the sibyls prophesied most clearly of Christ; that magicians, as wise men, by the wonderful secrets of the world, knew Christ to be born, and came to wors.h.i.+p him, first of all; and that the name of magicke is received by philosophers, commended by divines, and not unacceptable to the Gospel."

The study of astrology and occult philosophy, to which many of the finest minds of the Middle Ages devoted themselves without molestation from the Church, was never practised with impunity after the Reformation. The Puritans and Presbyterians, taking the Bible for their rule, "suffered not a witch to live;" and, not content with burning the books of those who "used curious arts" after the manner of the Ephesians, they sacrificed the students themselves on the same pile.

Hence we hear little of learned and scientific wizards in New England.

One remarkable character of this kind seems, however, to have escaped the vigilance of our modern Doctors of the Mosaic Law. Dr. Robert Child came to this country about the year 1644, and took up his residence in the Ma.s.sachusetts colony. He was a man of wealth, and owned plantations at Nashaway, now Lancaster, and at Saco, in Maine. He was skilful in mineralogy and metallurgy, and seems to have spent a good deal of money in searching for mines. He is well known as the author of the first decided movement for liberty of conscience in Ma.s.sachusetts, his name standing at the head of the famous pet.i.tion of 1646 for a modification of the laws in respect to religious wors.h.i.+p, and complaining in strong terms of the disfranchis.e.m.e.nt of persons not members of the Church. A tremendous excitement was produced by this remonstrance; clergy and magistrates joined in denouncing it; Dr. Child and his a.s.sociates were arrested, tried for contempt of government, and heavily fined. The Court, in pa.s.sing sentence, a.s.sured the Doctor that his crime was only equalled by that of Korah and his troop, who rebelled against Moses and Aaron. He resolved to appeal to the Parliament of England, and made arrangements for his departure, but was arrested, and ordered to be kept a prisoner in his own house until the vessel in which he was to sail had left Boston. He was afterwards imprisoned for a considerable length of time, and on his release found means to return to England. The Doctor's trunks were searched by the Puritan authorities while he was in prison; but it does not appear that they detected the occult studies to which lie was addicted, to which lucky circ.u.mstance it is doubtless owing that the first champion of religious liberty in the New World was not hung for a wizard.

Dr. Child was a graduate of the renowned University of Padua, and had travelled extensively in the Old World. Probably, like Michael Scott, be had:

"Learned the art of glammarye In Padua, beyond the sea;"

for I find in the dedication of an English translation of a Continental work on astrology and magic, printed in 1651 "at the sign of the Three Bibles," that his "sublime hermeticall and theomagicall lore" is compared to that of Hermes and Agrippa. He is complimented as a master of the mysteries of Rome and Germany, and as one who had pursued his investigations among the philosophers of the Old World and the Indians of the New, "leaving no stone unturned, the turning whereof might conduce to the discovery of what is occult."

There was still another member of the Friends' society in Vermont, of the name of Austin, who, in answer, as he supposed, to prayer and a long-cherished desire to benefit his afflicted fellow-creatures, received, as he believed, a special gift of healing. For several years applicants from nearly all parts of New England visited him with the story of their sufferings and praying for a relief, which, it is averred, was in many instances really obtained. Letters from the sick who were unable to visit him, describing their diseases, were sent him; and many are yet living who believe that they were restored miraculously at the precise period of time when Austin was engaged in reading their letters. One of my uncles was commissioned to convey to him a large number of letters from sick persons in his neighborhood. He found the old man sitting in his plain parlor in the simplest garb of his sect,-- grave, thoughtful, venerable,--a drab-coated Prince Hohenlohe. He received the letters in silence, read them slowly, casting them one after another upon a large pile of similar epistles in a corner of the apartment.

Half a century ago nearly every neighborhood in New England was favored with one or more reputed dealers in magic. Twenty years later there were two poor old sisters who used to frighten school urchins and "children of a larger growth" as they rode down from New Hamps.h.i.+re on their gaunt skeleton horses, strung over with baskets for the Newburyport market. They were aware of the popular notion concerning them, and not unfrequently took advantage of it to levy a sort of black mail upon their credulous neighbors. An attendant at the funeral of one of these sisters, who when living was about as unsubstantial as Ossian's ghost, through which the stars were visible, told me that her coffin was so heavy that four stout men could barely lift it.

One, of my earliest recollections is that of an old woman, residing about two miles from the place of my nativity, who for many years had borne the unenviable reputation of a witch. She certainly had the look of one,--a combination of form, voice, and features which would have made the fortune of an English witch finder in the days of Matthew Paris or the Sir John Podgers of d.i.c.kens, and insured her speedy conviction in King James's High Court of Justiciary. She was accused of divers ill- doings,--such as preventing the cream in her neighbor's churn from becoming b.u.t.ter, and snuffing out candles at huskings and quilting- parties.

"She roamed the country far and near, Bewitched the children of the peasants, Dried up the cows, and lamed the deer, And sucked the eggs, and killed the pheasants."

The poor old woman was at length so sadly annoyed by her unfortunate reputation that she took the trouble to go before a justice of the peace, and made solemn oath that she was a Christian woman, and no witch.

Not many years since a sad-visaged, middle-aged man might be seen in the streets of one of our seaboard towns at times suddenly arrested in the midst of a brisk walk and fixed motionless for some minutes in the busy thoroughfare. No effort could induce him to stir until, in his opinion, the spell was removed and his invisible tormentor suffered him to proceed. He explained his singular detention as the act of a whole family of witches whom he had unfortunately offended during a visit down East. It was rumored that the offence consisted in breaking off a matrimonial engagement with the youngest member of the family,--a sorceress, perhaps, in more than one sense of the word, like that "winsome wench and walie" in Tam O'Shanter's witch-dance at Kirk Alloway. His only hope was that he should outlive his persecutors; and it is said that at the very hour in which the event took place he exultingly a.s.sured his friends that the spell was forever broken, and that the last of the family of his tormentors was no more.

When a boy, I occasionally met, at the house of a relative in an adjoining town, a stout, red-nosed old farmer of the neighborhood.

A fine tableau he made of a winter's evening, in the red light of a birch-log fire, as he sat for hours watching its progress, with sleepy, half-shut eyes, changing his position only to reach the cider-mug on the shelf near him. Although he seldom opened his lips save to a.s.sent to some remark of his host or to answer a direct question, yet at times, when the cider-mug got the better of his taciturnity, he would amuse us with interesting details of his early experiences in "the Ohio country."

There was, however, one chapter in these experiences which he usually held in reserve, and with which "the stranger intermeddled not." He was not willing to run the risk of hearing that which to him was a frightful reality turned into ridicule by scoffers and unbelievers. The substance of it, as I received it from one of his neighbors, forms as clever a tale of witchcraft as modern times have produced.

It seems that when quite a young man he left the homestead, and, strolling westward, worked his way from place to place until he found himself in one of the old French settlements on the Ohio River. Here he procured employment on the farm of a widow; and being a smart, active fellow, and proving highly serviceable in his department, he rapidly gained favor in the eyes of his employer. Ere long, contrary to the advice of the neighbors, and in spite of somewhat discouraging hints touching certain matrimonial infelicities experienced by the late husband, he resolutely stepped into the dead man's shoes: the mistress became the wife, and the servant was legally promoted to the head of the household.--

For a time matters went on cosily and comfortably enough. He was now lord of the soil; and, as he laid in his crops of corn and potatoes, salted down his pork, and piled up his wood for winter's use, he naturally enough congratulated himself upon his good fortune and laughed at the sinister forebodings of his neighbors. But with the long winter months came a change over his "love's young dream." An evil and mysterious influence seemed to be at work in his affairs. Whatever he did after consulting his wife or at her suggestion resulted favorably enough; but all his own schemes and projects were unaccountably marred and defeated. If he bought a horse, it was sure to prove spavined or wind-broken. His cows either refused to give down their milk, or, giving it, perversely kicked it over. A fine sow which he had bargained for repaid his partiality by devouring, like Saturn, her own children.

By degrees a dark thought forced its way into his mind. Comparing his repeated mischances with the ante-nuptial warnings of his neighbors, he at last came to the melancholy conclusion that his wife was a witch.

The victim in Motherwell's ballad of the Demon Lady, or the poor fellow in the Arabian tale who discovered that he had married a ghoul in the guise of a young and blooming princess, was scarcely in a more sorrowful predicament. He grew nervous and fretful. Old dismal nursery stories and all the witch lore of boyhood came back to his memory; and he crept to his bed like a criminal to the gallows, half afraid to fall asleep lest his mysterious companion should take a fancy to transform him into a horse, get him shod at the smithy, and ride him to a witch-meeting.

And, as if to make the matter worse, his wife's affection seemed to increase just in proportion as his troubles thickened upon him. She aggravated him with all manner of caresses and endearments. This was the drop too much. The poor husband recoiled from her as from a waking nightmare. His thoughts turned to New England; he longed to see once more the old homestead, with its tall well-sweep and b.u.t.ternut-trees by the roadside; and he sighed amidst the rich bottom-lands of his new home for his father's rocky pasture, with its crop of stinted mulleins. So one cold November day, finding himself out of sight and hearing of his wife, he summoned courage to attempt an escape, and, resolutely turning his back on the West, plunged into the wilderness towards the sunrise.

After a long and hard journey he reached his birthplace, and was kindly welcomed by his old friends. Keeping a close mouth with respect to his unlucky adventure in Ohio, he soon after married one of his schoolmates, and, by dint of persevering industry and economy, in a few years found himself in possession of a comfortable home.

But his evil star still lingered above the horizon. One summer evening, on returning from the hayfield, who should meet him but his witch wife from Ohio! She came riding up the street on her old white horse, with a pillion behind the saddle. Accosting him in a kindly tone, yet not without something of gentle reproach for his unhandsome desertion of her, she informed him that she had come all the way from Ohio to take him back again.

It was in vain that he pleaded his later engagements; it was in vain that his new wife raised her shrillest remonstrances, not unmingled with expressions of vehement indignation at the revelation of her husband's real position; the witch wife was inexorable; go he must, and that speedily. Fully impressed with a belief in her supernatural power of compelling obedience, and perhaps dreading more than witchcraft itself the effects of the unlucky disclosure on the temper of his New England helpmate, he made a virtue of the necessity of the case, bade farewell to the latter amidst a perfect hurricane of reproaches, and mounted the white horse, with his old wife on the pillion behind him.

Of that ride Burger might have written a counterpart to his ballad:--

"Tramp, tramp, along the sh.o.r.e they ride, Splash, splash, along the sea."

Two or three years had pa.s.sed away, bringing no tidings of the unfortunate husband, when be once more made his appearance in his native village. He was not disposed to be very communicative; but for one thing, at least, he seemed willing to express his grat.i.tude. His Ohio wife, having no spell against intermittent fever, had paid the debt of nature, and had left him free; in view of which, his surviving wife, after manifesting a due degree of resentment, consented to take him back to her bed and board; and I could never learn that she had cause to regret her clemency.

THE BEAUTIFUL

"A beautiful form is better than a beautiful face; a beautiful behavior is better than a beautiful form; it gives a higher pleasure than statues or pictures; it is the finest of the fine arts."

EMERSON'S Essays, Second Series, iv., p. 162.

A FEW days since I was walking with a friend, who, unfortunately for himself, seldom meets with anything in the world of realities worthy of comparison with the ideal of his fancy, which, like the bird in the Arabian tale, glides perpetually before him, always near yet never overtaken. He was half humorously, half seriously, complaining of the lack of beauty in the faces and forms that pa.s.sed us on the crowded sidewalk. Some defect was noticeable in all: one was too heavy, another too angular; here a nose was at fault, there a mouth put a set of otherwise fine features out of countenance; the fair complexions had red hair, and glossy black locks were wasted upon dingy ones. In one way or another all fell below his impossible standard.

The beauty which my friend seemed in search of was that of proportion and coloring; mechanical exactness; a due combination of soft curves and obtuse angles, of warm carnation and marble purity. Such a man, for aught I can see, might love a graven image, like the girl of Florence who pined into a shadow for the Apollo Belvidere, looking coldly on her with stony eyes from his niche in the Vatican. One thing is certain,-- he will never find his faultless piece of artistical perfection by searching for it amidst flesh-and-blood realities. Nature does not, as far as I can perceive, work with square and compa.s.s, or lay on her colors by the rules of royal artists or the dunces of the academies.

She eschews regular outlines. She does not shape her forms by a common model. Not one of Eve's numerous progeny in all respects resembles her who first culled the flowers of Eden. To the infinite variety and picturesque inequality of Nature we owe the great charm of her uncloying beauty. Look at her primitive woods; scattered trees, with moist sward and bright mosses at their roots; great clumps of green shadow, where limb intwists with limb and the rustle of one leaf stirs a hundred others,--stretching up steep hillsides, flooding with green beauty the valleys, or arching over with leaves the sharp ravines, every tree and shrub unlike its neighbor in size and proportion,--the old and storm- broken leaning on the young and vigorous,--intricate and confused, without order or method. Who would exchange this for artificial French gardens, where every tree stands stiff and regular, clipped and trimmed into unvarying conformity, like so many grenadiers under review? Who wants eternal suns.h.i.+ne or shadow? Who would fix forever the loveliest cloudwork of an autumn sunset, or hang over him an everlasting moonlight? If the stream had no quiet eddying place, could we so admire its cascade over the rocks? Were there no clouds, could we so hail the sky s.h.i.+ning through them in its still, calm purity? Who shall venture to ask our kind Mother Nature to remove from our sight any one of her forms or colors? Who shall decide which is beautiful, or otherwise, in itself considered?

There are too many, like my fastidious friend, who go through the world "from Dan to Beersheba, finding all barren,"--who have always some fault or other to find with Nature and Providence, seeming to consider themselves especially ill used because the one does not always coincide with their taste, nor the other with their narrow notions of personal convenience. In one of his early poems, Coleridge has well expressed a truth, which is not the less important because it is not generally admitted. The idea is briefly this: that the mind gives to all things their coloring, their gloom, or gladness; that the pleasure we derive from external nature is primarily from ourselves:--

"from the mind itself must issue forth A light, a glory, a fair luminous mist, Enveloping the earth."

The real difficulty of these lifelong hunters after the beautiful exists in their own spirits. They set up certain models of perfection in their imaginations, and then go about the world in the vain expectation of finding them actually wrought out according to pattern; very unreasonably calculating that Nature will suspend her everlasting laws for the purpose of creating faultless prodigies for their especial gratification.