Chapter XII
Mr. Cotton Mather visits Deliverance
Now, upon the very day of Abigail’s disappearance, ye godly minister of Boston Town, Mr. Cotton Mather, was in Salem in attendance upon the trial of an old woman, whose spectre had appeared to several people and terrified them with horrible threats. Furthermore, the Beadle had testified to having seen her “Dead Shape” lurking in the very pulpit of the church. It was with unusual relish Cotton Mather had heard her condemnation to death, considering her crime, in particular, deliberate treason to the Lord.
As he stepped from the hot and dusty court into the fresh air, salt with the sea and bright with the sunshine, a great rush of gladness filled his heart, and he mentally framed a prayer that with God’s assistance he might rid this fair, new land of witches, and behold the church of his fathers firmly established. Leaving his horse for the present where it was tied to the hitching-post, outside the meeting-house, he walked slowly down the village street to the inn, there to have luncheon before setting out for Boston Town.
The fruit trees growing adown the street were green, and cast little clumps of shadow on the cobblestone pavement. And he thought of their fruitage—being minded to happy thoughts at remembrance of duty done—in the golden autumn, when the stern Puritans held a feast day in thanksgiving to the Lord.
All the impassioned tenderness of the poet awoke in him at the sight of these symbolical little trees.
“And there are the fair fruit trees,” he murmured, “and also the trees of emptiness.”
Now he bowed to a group of the gossips knitting on a door-stoop in the sun, and now he stooped to set upon its feet a little child that had fallen. At the stocks he dispelled sternly a group of boys who were tickling the feet of the writhing prisoners.
Thus, in one of the rarely serene moments of his troubled life, he made his leisurely way.
But only his exalted mood, wrapping him as an invisible, impenetrable garment, enabled him to pass thus serenely.