Delusion; or, The Witch of New England

"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.

PREFACE.

The scenes and characters of this little tale are wholly fictitious. It will be found that the tragic interest that belongs to the history of the 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, but to show how circumstances may unfold the inward strength of a timid woman, so that she may at last be willing to die rather than yield to the delusion that would have preserved her life.

If it is objected that the young and lovely are seldom accused of any witchcraft except that of bewitching hearts, we answer, that of those who were actually accused, many were young; and those who maintained a firm integrity against the overwhelming power of the delusion of the period must have possessed an intellectual beauty which it would be vain to endeavor to portray.

This imperfect effort is submitted with much diffidence, to the indulgence of the courteous reader.

THE WITCH OF NEW ENGLAND.

CHAPTER I.

"Ay, call it holy ground, The soil where first they trod: They have left unstained what there they found,-- Freedom to worship God."

New England scenery is said to be deficient in romantic and poetic associations. 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 scenery are not marred by the monuments of an age of violence and wrong; and our silent valleys retain no remnant of the abodes of self-indulgent and superstitious devotion; but the descendant of the Pilgrims finds, in many of the fairest scenes of New England, some memento to carry back the imagination to those heroic and self-sacrificing ancestors. His soul is warmed and elevated when he remembers that devoted company, who were sustained amid hardship and every privation, on the trackless ocean, and in the mysterious and appalling solitudes of the forest, by a firm devotion to duty, and an all-pervading sense of the immediate presence of God.

The faults of our ancestors were the faults of their age. It is not now understood--and how wide from it was the conviction then!--that even toleration implies intoleration. Who is to judge what opinions are to be tolerated? He whom circumstance has invested at the moment with power?

The scene I wish to describe was on the borders of one of the interior villages of New England,--a mountain village, embosomed in high hills, from which the winter torrents, as they met in the plain, united to form one of those clear, sparkling rivers, in whose beautiful mirror the surrounding hills were reflected. The stream, "winding at its own sweet will," enclosed a smooth meadow. At the extremity of the meadow, and shadowed by the mountain, nestled one of the poorest farm-houses, or cottages, 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 shed for a cow, a covering for a cart, and a small barn were all. But the situation of this humble and lonely dwelling was one of surpassing beauty. The soft meadow in front was dotted with weeping elms and birches; the opposite and neighboring hills were covered to their summits with the richest wood, while openings here and there admitted glimpses of the distant country.