Of course, the names of these doctors are nowhere to be found in her volume, nor does any one, unwarped by prejudice, really believe more than a very small part of this story.
That there was digging is certain.
That there had been plenty of time to hide anything that David Fox had desired to hide in the cellar, is certain.
Yet Mrs. Kane remembered absolutely nothing about anything having been found in the cellar that bore the slightest semblance to any portion of the human frame. If any bones (perchance, like those found in the creek, the skeleton of a horse) were uncovered, she denies positively that any doctor ever gave the opinion that they were the remains of a man.
She pronounces equally false, the statement of Leah that about the time the digging was abandoned, on account of the angry interference of a mob, the spades of the diggers struck upon a hollow-sounding, wooden substance, which might or might not have been a box of ill-gotten plunder, or the rough sepulchre of the slain pedler.
The indignation of the neighbors of the Foxes in Arcadia was not so much due to the fact that the latter persisted in pretending to communicate with ghosts and uncanny elfs, as it was to the totally unwarranted suspicion which had been cast through the early “rappings” upon a man named Bell, who had formerly lived in the house, which it was now pretended was haunted. This, as well as other evidence of the public feeling at that time, was cleverly employed for her own benefit by Leah, who easily foresaw how anything that might bear the semblance of religious persecution would promote her cause, false though it was, by bringing to it both greater notoriety and widespread sympathy.
There is no doubt, too, that if there had not been a very strong vein of superstition in the Fox family, the first “rappings” would never have produced the deep impression that they did on the mother and her son David. Many strange stories, which had been handed down from a grandfather or a great-grandfather, a great uncle or a great aunt, were told at the fireside with such embellishment as will inevitably come from recital and repetition to a wonder-delighting audience. There were traditions of prophecies fulfilled and of dumb cattle behaving queerly, all of which Mrs. Underhill has very carefully set down and magnified in her own peculiar manner to her own unholy purpose.