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Tales and Sketches

J >> John Greenleaf Whittier >> Tales and Sketches




The practice of charms, or what is popularly called "trying projects,"
is still, to some extent, continued in New England. The inimitable
description which Burns gives of similar practices in his Halloween may
not in all respects apply to these domestic conjurations; but the
following needs only the substitution of apple-seeds for nuts:--

"The auld gude wife's wheel-hoordet nits
Are round an' round divided;
An' mony lads and lassies' fates
Are there that night decided.
Some kindle couthie side by side
An' burn thegither trimly;
Some start awa wi' saucy pride
And jump out owre the chimlie."

One of the most common of these "projects" is as follows: A young woman
goes down into the cellar, or into a dark room, with a mirror in her
hand, and looking in it, sees the face of her future husband peering at
her through the darkness,--the mirror being, for the time, as potent as
the famous Cambuscan glass of which Chaucer discourses. A neighbor of
mine, in speaking of this conjuration, adduces a case in point. One of
her schoolmates made the experiment and saw the face of a strange man in
the glass; and many years afterwards she saw the very man pass her
father's door. He proved to be an English emigrant just landed, and in
due time became her husband. Burns alludes to something like the spell
above described:--

"Wee Jenny to her grannie says,
'will ye go wi' me, grannie,
To eat an apple at the glass
I got from Uncle Johnnie?'
She fuff't her pipe wi' sic a lunt,
In wrath she was so vaporin',
She noticed na an' azle brunt
Her bran new worset apron.

"Ye little skelpan-limmer's face,
How dare ye try sic sportin',
An' seek the foul thief ony place
For him to try your fortune?
Nae doubt but ye may get a sight;
Great cause ye hae to fear it;
For mony a one has gotten a fright,
An' lived and died delecrit."

It is not to be denied, and for truth's sake not to be regretted, that
this amusing juvenile glammary has seen its best days in New England.
The schoolmaster has been abroad to some purpose. Not without results
have our lyceum lecturers and travels of Peter Parley brought everything
in heaven above and in the earth below to the level of childhood's
capacities. In our cities and large towns children nowadays pass
through the opening acts of life's marvellous drama with as little
manifestation of wonder and surprise as the Indian does through the
streets of a civilized city which he has entered for the first time.
Yet Nature, sooner or later, vindicates her mysteries; voices from the
unseen penetrate the din of civilization. The child philosopher and
materialist often becomes the visionary of riper years, running into
illuminism, magnetism, and transcendentalism, with its inspired priests
and priestesses, its revelations and oracular responses.

But in many a green valley of rural New England there are children yet;
boys and girls are still to be found not quite overtaken by the march of
mind. There, too, are huskings, and apple-bees, and quilting parties,
and huge old-fashioned fireplaces piled with crackling walnut, flinging
its rosy light over happy countenances of youth and scarcely less happy
age. If it be true that, according to Cornelius Agrippa, "a wood fire
doth drive away dark spirits," it is, nevertheless, also true that
around it the simple superstitions of our ancestors still love to
linger; and there the half-sportful, half-serious charms of which I have
spoken are oftenest resorted to. It would be altogether out of place to
think of them by our black, unsightly stoves, or in the dull and dark
monotony of our furnace-heated rooms. Within the circle of the light of
the open fire safely might the young conjurers question destiny; for
none but kindly and gentle messengers from wonderland could venture
among them. And who of us, looking back to those long autumnal evenings
of childhood when the glow of the kitchen-fire rested on the beloved
faces of home, does not feel that there is truth and beauty in what the
quaint old author just quoted affirms? "As the spirits of darkness grow
stronger in the dark, so good spirits, which are angels of light, are
multiplied and strengthened, not only by the divine light of the sun and
stars, but also by the light of our common wood-fires." Even Lord
Bacon, in condemning the superstitious beliefs of his day, admits that
they might serve for winter talk around the fireside.

Fairy faith is, we may safely say, now dead everywhere,--buried,
indeed,--for the mad painter Blake saw the funeral of the last of the
little people, and an irreverent English bishop has sung their requiem.
It never had much hold upon the Yankee mind, our superstitions being
mostly of a sterner and less poetical kind. The Irish Presbyterians who
settled in New Hampshire about the year 1720 brought indeed with them,
among other strange matters, potatoes and fairies; but while the former
took root and flourished among us, the latter died out, after lingering
a few years in a very melancholy and disconsolate way, looking
regretfully back to their green turf dances, moonlight revels, and
cheerful nestling around the shealing fires of Ireland. The last that
has been heard of them was some forty or fifty years ago in a tavern
house in S-------, New Hampshire. The landlord was a spiteful little
man, whose sour, pinched look was a standing libel upon the state of his
larder. He made his house so uncomfortable by his moroseness that
travellers even at nightfall pushed by his door and drove to the next
town. Teamsters and drovers, who in those days were apt to be very
thirsty, learned, even before temperance societies were thought of, to
practice total abstinence on that road, and cracked their whips and
goaded on their teams in full view of a most tempting array of bottles
and glasses, from behind which the surly little landlord glared out upon
them with a look which seemed expressive of all sorts of evil wishes,
broken legs, overturned carriages, spavined horses, sprained oxen,
unsavory poultry, damaged butter, and bad markets. And if, as a matter
of necessity, to "keep the cold out of his stomach," occasionally a
wayfarer stopped his team and ventured to call for "somethin' warmin',"
the testy publican stirred up the beverage in such a spiteful way, that,
on receiving it foaming from his hand, the poor customer was half afraid
to open his mouth, lest the red-hot flip iron should be plunged down his
gullet.

As a matter of course, poverty came upon the house and its tenants like
an armed man. Loose clapboards rattled in the wind; rags fluttered from
the broken windows; within doors were tattered children and scanty fare.
The landlord's wife was a stout, buxom woman, of Irish lineage, and,
what with scolding her husband and liberally patronizing his bar in his
absence, managed to keep, as she said, her "own heart whole," although
the same could scarcely be said of her children's trousers and her own
frock of homespun. She confidently predicted that "a betther day was
coming," being, in fact, the only thing hopeful about the premises. And
it did come, sure enough. Not only all the regular travellers on the
road made a point of stopping at the tavern, but guests from all the
adjacent towns filled its long-deserted rooms,--the secret of which was,
that it had somehow got abroad that a company of fairies had taken up
their abode in the hostelry and daily held conversation with each other
in the capacious parlor. I have heard those who at the time visited the
tavern say that it was literally thronged for several weeks. Small,
squeaking voices spoke in a sort of Yankee-Irish dialect, in the haunted
room, to the astonishment and admiration of hundreds. The inn, of
course, was blessed by this fairy visitation; the clapboards ceased
their racket, clear panes took the place of rags in the sashes, and the
little till under the bar grew daily heavy with coin. The magical
influence extended even farther; for it was observable that the landlord
wore a good-natured face, and that the landlady's visits to the gin-
bottle were less and less frequent. But the thing could not, in the
nature of the case, continue long. It was too late in the day and on
the wrong side of the water. As the novelty wore off, people began to
doubt and reason about it. Had the place been traversed by a ghost or
disturbed by a witch they could have acquiesced in it very quietly; but
this outlandish belief in fairies was altogether an overtask for Yankee
credulity. As might have been expected, the little strangers, unable to
breathe in an atmosphere of doubt and suspicion, soon took their leave,
shaking off the dust of their elfin feet as a testimony against an
unbelieving generation. It was, indeed, said that certain rude fellows
from the Bay State pulled away a board from the ceiling and disclosed to
view the fairies in the shape of the landlady's three slatternly
daughters. But the reader who has any degree of that charity which
thinks no evil will rather credit the statement of the fairies
themselves, as reported by the mistress of the house, "that they were
tired of the new country, and had no pace of their lives among the
Yankees, and were going back to Ould Ireland."

It is a curious fact that the Indians had some notion of a race of
beings corresponding in many respects to the English fairies.
Schoolcraft describes them as small creatures in human shape, inhabiting
rocks, crags, and romantic dells, and delighting especially in points of
land jutting into lakes and rivers and which were covered with
pinetrees. They were called Puckweedjinees,--little vanishers.

In a poetical point of view it is to be regretted that our ancestors did
not think it worth their while to hand down to us more of the simple and
beautiful traditions and beliefs of the "heathen round about" them.
Some hints of them we glean from the writings of the missionary Mayhew
and the curious little book of Roger Williams. Especially would one
like to know more of that domestic demon, Wetuomanit, who presided over
household affairs, assisted the young squaw in her first essay at
wigwam-keeping, gave timely note of danger, and kept evil spirits at a
distance,--a kind of new-world brownie, gentle and useful.

Very suggestive, too, is the story of Pumoolah,--a mighty spirit, whose
home is on the great Katahdin Mountain, sitting there with his earthly
bride (a beautiful daughter of the Penobscots transformed into an
immortal by her love), in serenest sunshine, above the storm which
crouches and growls at his feet. None but the perfectly pure and good
can reach his abode. Many have from time to time attempted it in vain;
some, after almost reaching the summit, have been driven back by
thunderbolts or sleety whirlwinds.

Not far from my place of residence are the ruins of a mill, in a narrow
ravine fringed with trees. Some forty years ago the mill was supposed
to be haunted; and horse-shoes, in consequence, were nailed over its
doors. One worthy man, whose business lay beyond the mill, was afraid
to pass it alone; and his wife, who was less fearful of supernatural
annoyance, used to accompany him. The little old white-coated miller,
who there ground corn and wheat for his neighbors, whenever he made a
particularly early visit to his mill, used to hear it in full
operation,--the water-wheel dashing bravely, and the old rickety
building clattering to the jar of the stones. Yet the moment his hand
touched the latch or his foot the threshold all was hushed save the
melancholy drip of water from the dam or the low gurgle of the small
stream eddying amidst willow roots and mossy stones in the ravine below.

This haunted mill has always reminded me of that most beautiful of
Scottish ballads, the Song of the Elfin Miller, in which fairies are
represented as grinding the poor man's grist without toil:--

"Full merrily rings the mill-stone round;
Full merrily rings the wheel;
Full merrily gushes out the grist;
Come, taste my fragrant meal.
The miller he's a warldly man,
And maun hae double fee;
So draw the sluice in the churl's dam
And let the stream gae free!"

Brainerd, who truly deserves the name of an American poet, has left
behind him a ballad on the Indian legend of the black fox which haunted
Salmon River, a tributary of the Connecticut. Its wild and picturesque
beauty causes us to regret that more of the still lingering traditions
of the red men have not been made the themes of his verse:--


THE BLACK FOX.

"How cold, how beautiful, how bright
The cloudless heaven above us shines!
But 't is a howling winter's night;
'T would freeze the very forest pines.

"The winds are up while mortals sleep;
The stars look forth while eyes are shut;
The bolted snow lies drifted deep
Around our poor and lonely hut.

"With silent step and listening ear,
With bow and arrow, dog and gun,
We'll mark his track,--his prowl we hear:
Now is our time! Come on! come on!

"O'er many a fence, through many a wood,
Following the dog's bewildered scent,
In anxious haste and earnest mood,
The white man and the Indian went.

"The gun is cocked; the bow is bent;
The dog stands with uplifted paw;
And ball and arrow both are sent,
Aimed at the prowler's very jaw.

"The ball to kill that fox is run
Not in a mould by mortals made;
The arrow which that fox should shun
Was never shaped from earthly reed.

"The Indian Druids of the wood
Know where the fatal arrows grow;
They spring not by the summer flood;
They pierce not through the winter's snow.

"Why cowers the dog, whose snuffing nose
Was never once deceived till now?
And why amidst the chilling snows
Does either hunter wipe his brow?

"For once they see his fearful den;
'T is a dark cloud that slowly moves
By night around the homes of men,
By day along the stream it loves.

"Again the dog is on the track,
The hunters chase o'er dale and hill;
They may not, though they would, look back;
They must go forward, forward still.

"Onward they go, and never turn,
Amidst a night which knows no day;
For nevermore shall morning sun
Light them upon their endless way.

"The hut is desolate; and there
The famished dog alone returns;
On the cold steps he makes his lair;
By the shut door he lays his bones.

"Now the tired sportsman leans his gun
Against the ruins on its site,
And ponders on the hunting done
By the lost wanderers of the night.

"And there the little country girls
Will stop to whisper, listen, and look,
And tell, while dressing their sunny curls,
Of the Black Fox of Salmon Brook."

The same writer has happily versified a pleasant superstition of the
valley of the Connecticut. It is supposed that shad are led from the
Gulf of Mexico to the Connecticut by a kind of Yankee bogle in the shape
of a bird.






THE SHAD SPIRIT.

"Now drop the bolt, and securely nail
The horse-shoe over the door;
'T is a wise precaution; and, if it should fail,
It never failed before.

"Know ye the shepherd that gathers his flock
Where the gales of the equinox blow
From each unknown reef and sunken rock
In the Gulf of Mexico,--

"While the monsoons growl, and the trade-winds bark,
And the watch-dogs of the surge
Pursue through the wild waves the ravenous shark
That prowls around their charge?

"To fair Connecticut's northernmost source,
O'er sand-bars, rapids, and falls,
The Shad Spirit holds his onward course
With the flocks which his whistle calls.

"Oh, how shall he know where he went before?
Will he wander around forever?
The last year's shad heads shall shine on the shore,
To light him up the river.

"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 passed the bolted door
Where the rusted horse-shoe clings;
So carry the nets to the nearest shore,
And take what the Shad Spirit brings."

The comparatively innocent nature and simple poetic beauty of this class
of superstitions 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 compassion; 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 Hampshire;
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 Hampshire 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 Hampshire, within
sight of my mother's home, dwelt a plain, sedate member of the society
of Friends, named Bantum. He passed 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 assumed 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, superstitious 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
superstitious 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 worship 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 Massachusetts 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 Massachusetts, his name
standing at the head of the famous petition of 1646 for a modification
of the laws in respect to religious worship, and complaining in strong
terms of the disfranchisement 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 associates were
arrested, tried for contempt of government, and heavily fined. The
Court, in passing sentence, assured 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 circumstance it is doubtless owing that
the first champion of religious liberty in the New World was not hung
for a wizard.

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