WITCH HILL, SALEM.
[CHAPTER XIV.]
SALEM VILLAGE, AND '92.
Banquo. "Were such things here as we do speak about?
Or have we eaten of the insane root,
That takes the reason prisoner?"—Macbeth.
Salem Village has a sorrowful celebrity. It would seem as if an adverse spell still hung over it, for in the changes brought by time to its neighbors it has no part, remaining, as it is likely to remain, Salem Village—that is to say, distinctively antiquated, sombre, and lifeless.
A collection of houses scattered along the old high-road from Salem to Andover, decent-looking, brown-roofed, though humble dwellings, a somewhat pretending village church, and pleasant, home-like, parsonage; old trees, partly verdant, partly withered, stretching naked boughs above the gables of houses even older than themselves, embody something of the impressions of oft-repeated walks in what is known as the "Witch Neighborhood."
The village contains one central point of paramount interest. It is an inclosed space of grass ground, a short distance from the principal and only street, reached by a well-trodden by-path. Within this now naked field once stood a house, with a garden and orchard surrounding. Of the house nothing remains except a slight depression in the soil; of the orchard and garden there is no trace; yet hard by I chanced on a bank of aromatic thyme once held of singular potency in witchcraft—as in the "Faerie Queen," the tree laments to the knight:
"I chanced to see her in her proper hue,
Bathing herself in origan and thyme."