"Do let me rake open the embers and give you a bowl of yarb tea, and put another coverlet on the bed," she urged, in her stiff, motherly way; "the teeth e'en a'most chatter in your head; you'll sartinly be took down agin."
"No, no! I shall be quieter now that I know—that I know all about the country, thank you."
And with a soft, gliding step, noiseless as when she entered, Barbara went into her room again.
"That's strange," muttered Goody Brown, as she sat before the buried fire with a foot planted on each andiron, meditating on the conversation she had just held. "Now can she be any relative to the governor or his wife, or the Salem minister, I wonder? She's mighty curious about them. Well, thank goodness, I'd as lief tell her all I know about 'em as not. There ain't no witchcraft in the truth."
CHAPTER VIII.
THE MINISTER AND HIS PUPIL.
Governor Phipps and Samuel Parris had been neighbors for many years. They had known each other when Parris was first settled over the church in Salem—a man in his prime—and the governor was the apprentice of a ship-builder near by. More than this; when Phipps was an apprentice and a dreamer, as all men of great capacities are at some period of their lives, thirsting for knowledge and restive as a wild animal, because all its sources were closed to him, Samuel Parris received the lad every night beneath his roof, and spent hours and hours in teaching him those rudiments of learning which are the key to all knowledge.
Parris had been an enthusiast, and a visionary man from his youth up. He was simple, pious, with a vein of rich poetry in his nature which could never be worked out fully in the pulpit, but was concentrated in his affections, and sometimes threatened the very foundations of his understanding.
The predominance of a vivid imagination over faculties of no ordinary stamp kept the minister's mind out of balance, and made his life an unfinished poem. Had all the other faculties of his mind been equal, Samuel Parris must have been a great poet or powerful statesman. Lacking so much and possessing so much, he was always good, affectionate, and most kind. A love of the pure and beautiful possessed him so entirely that it broke forth in veins of exquisite poetry in his sermons, and at times gave to his conversation an eloquence which seemed like absolute inspiration.