The great events, especially if at a distance, fill large spaces in our histories; but, like a marriage or death in the family, they occupy but a comparatively brief part of the life of any of its members. There is a great deal of water, even in rivers that are famous for large fish, that holds no fish at all,—waters whose onflow gladdens and refreshes large districts. A nation or a community must at some time have marked events to stir its blood and create noble memories; but it cannot live on Fourth of July or the remembrance of Waterloo. The life of the greater part of the colonists passed, as that of most people in all times and countries is spent, in quiet, steady work during the day, eating three meals if they had them, and two if they had not, and in sleeping as well nights as the hot or cold weather, wives or children, or other disturbers of the peace, would permit. We read of some red-letter event, like Kidd’s piracies in 1696–1698, that tossed from the deck possibly twenty people; and fancy that this Semmes must have borne an important part in those closing years of the century, without reflecting that almost every week in the year records more victims on our rivers and railroads,—victims despatched by us between the mouthfuls of our toast at breakfast. Such events bear the same relation to the volume of life as the capital letters, which head the chapters of a book, to its solid contents. They are the daubs of paint on the card of gingerbread; the small pinholes pricked in the large family loaf. We eat one thousand and ninety-four meals in the year without any recollection of them; we remember only the one Thanksgiving dinner which did us no more good than the others, and which probably, like Kidd’s piracies, stuck in our crops very distressingly. No doubt many of the colonists never heard of Robert Kidd; and others, who had listened to Mary Jane singing the song which told “how he sailed,” fancied that, like Bluebeard, he was only invented for songs and red-covered primers. In fine, these notable events are, in general, but the froth-bubbles on the river’s surface. The solid on-pressing mass does not feel the puffy little globes, iridescent though they be, and swells though they may appear to the few fish just around them. There was only one Kidd on the wide seas. Of the many other craft, carefully managed, sailing slowly and wearily, earning patient wages, and making port at the same time, we hear nothing.
So the race drifts, scuds, tacks, works, or runs towards the great harbor. So was it in the seventeenth century. Old people, as now, took to tea, dozy armchairs, tedious gossip, and mumbling recollections of the golden days of youth,—golden even if actually passed amid steel points, arrow-heads, or among the rude ploughshares of ever-recurring, never-ending toil. Grief and gladness pendulated with regular swings and carried the hour-hands of family life evenly and surely on through the uneventful spaces, until at last the solemn bell struck. Then a new mound was sodded under the willow-trees in the rude churchyard, whose slate-stones notched the advance of the Colonies. Among the young people love crept in, too, under shaggy vests and calico bodices. Soft words passed into earnest vows, and clergymen or country squires welded the glowing pieces into instruments of uncomplaining labor and life-long use. Then came new voices into the house, and,—well, at the winding-up of the century there were two hundred and thirty-five thousand people in the settlements. There would have been more, but—Chicago had not yet started.
And now, tying our coltish Colonies to the bars of the eighteenth century, we leave them for a short time while we run down a few stray subjects, skittishly grazing in the back pastures. We shall soon return to drive them all into the ranker grass of the opening plantations.
CHAPTER IX.
WITCHCRAFT.
The Witch-Caldron at Salem.—How its Bubbling raised Teapot Lids and has kept open other Lids ever since.—The Young Female Witches at Salem condemned to the Ties of Matrimony; the Old Ones to harder Knots.—The Sin of being Old considered.—The Scarlet Letter.—Examples of Witchcraft cited.—The Delusion of Adam and Eve at the first Pomological Convention in Eden.—Woman as Man’s Familiar Spirit; and her Conjuries.—Cases of David, Samson, and Herod.—Antony dissolved in that Egyptian Drink, Pearl Water.—The Maid of Orleans and what an Arc she subtended.—The Philters of Love, Ambition, Heroism, etc., administered to Men and Nations.—Their Effects.—Delusions, like Measles, catching.—The Frenzies of Fashion fully described.—The Stock Exchange.—Private Witchcrafts at Quiltings, Apple-Parings, etc.—Red Corn and other Red Ears.—Sweet Witches.—A Jury of Gushing Girls.—Punishment of Men incapable of being bewitched.
Just as the last sands were dropping at once out of the hour-glasses of the seventeenth century and of a few old women at Salem, a strange trouble bubbled up in that little teapot of a place, which not only raised its lid at the time, but has kept a great many wide-open eyes fixed on it ever since, to see how it happened, and whether it would not, perhaps, do it again. Do it again! of course not; and very sorry that it ever did it at all. Let us distill from it first-proof historical stimulation, while we wait for the colts to cool off.
Young women had often at Salem, as elsewhere, troubled men, and for the misdemeanor had been condemned to the stocks—of marriage. But what to do with the ill-favored, old ladies who, in 1692, were accused of breaking the rest of both old and young,—of disturbing two organs, the spleen and gall, lying near that excitable old offender, the heart, and of stopping judicial digestion,—puzzled the brain of the wisest, yea, even the solid, well-set cerebrum of Cotton Mather. Much pondering was there, much exorcising, much studying of the twenty-eighth chapter of 1 Samuel, and diligent rummaging of chronicles, Jewish, Egyptian, French, and English, to find descriptions of the vice, and the punishments therefor. The sin of being old is, in a new country where young activities are alone valuable, always great. At quaint, gable-ended Salem it became a swinging crime.
How the knot was eventually not cut, but tied, all the world knows. Everybody remembers how those aged agitators were taken around the neck, not by future spouses, as the young Salemites were, but by cords most unsilken. The delusion of course soon vanished with the twenty victims; but the Scarlet Letter, written at the time, which tells the affecting story, is still handed around unsealed, and will ever be read with witching interest.
1692.