We know as a certain fact of the existence of a natural element of power called electricity, but what is it, and whence does it come? To the ignorant it performs miracles in an apparently supernatural way, while to the intelligent it is regarded as a subtle natural force coming from the universal laboratory of boundless nature and as unending as time itself. In electricity, as in many other manifestations of the forces of nature, we see only results, and know little or nothing of the first cause. The time, however, let us hope, is not far off when origins will be as easily demonstrable as is now the seeing of effects we cannot understand.
Present indications point to the early solution of all superstitions, many of which for centuries have construed some of the simplest happenings, which could not upon any known principles be explained, into demonstrations flowing from supernatural sources. Superstition must certainly fall before the great and impartial sweep of modern research. In at least one direction, the battle will be of long duration, but at the end of the conflict, the vicious old fabric coined out of ages of falsehood as old as our civilization, sustained by centuries of superstitious ignorance and countless unspeakable cruelties and crimes, will totter from its foundation in the limitless sphere of human credulity, and fall, let us hope, to its final decay.
The destruction of that inveterate enemy of intellectual progress and the human race, will be the culminating triumph of scientific achievement and the crowning glory of human effort in the interest of a more exalted conception of the Deity, better morals, and a higher plane of civilization.
From my birth to and including a part of the year 1846, I lived with my grandparents in the town of Pomfret, Vermont. The inhabitants of that old rural community during my time were, I believe without exception, descendants from the early English colonists of Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Rhode Island. They were an orderly, law-abiding, industrious, and honest people, intensely patriotic, believing in the fruits of the Revolution, in many of the battles of which they and their immediate ancestors had taken part.
Up to the period of my early days they were still engaged in the continuous difficult task of creating homes for their families and in building a new state, and had but little time to bestow upon books or mental culture of any sort. Their lives were laborious and beset with many hardships. Indeed, it may be truly said of them that, from an academic or bookish standpoint, they were educated and enlightened only to a limited extent. Each household had its cupboard of books brought from “below,” and they retained in their memories an interesting stock of historic traditions and patriotic anecdotes, many of which were connected with the early history of a majority of the families of this community. The frequent recital of these served to keep alive the patriotic spirit, and to impress upon the minds of the rising generation the importance and value of the heroic services performed by their ancestors.
As a rule, this little New England town unit, composed of strong, hardy unlettered men and women, was exceptionally free from natural stupidity and the usual répertoire of rural superstitions, but they had a few which were dear to many of the good old New England housewives of my particular period. Among them was a belief in the misfortunes likely to attend new undertakings begun on Friday; they had a perfect reliance in the ill ending of any enterprise connected with the number thirteen; and it was rank heresy for any one not to believe in the ill-omened, grief-stricken howls of the family dog. That this latter belief was not without a certain reasonable shadow of foundation, I am about to show in the relation of a series of remarkable incidents, which are of a sort that up to this time have not been explained.
MYSTERIES
AUGUST 27, 1840
In the month of August, 1840, the twenty-seventh day, to be exact, I was still at the “old H——n Place” with my grandparents. “Just before bedtime” of the night of that day my grandmother called the attention of the household to the mournful and unusual howls of the little house dog that was sitting in the front yard with his nose pointed straight up, crying most piteously.