The settler saw his oaken flail
Take bud, and bloom before his eyes;
From frozen pools he saw the pale,
Sweet summer lilies rise.
* * *
The beechen platter sprouted wild,
The pipkin wore its old-time green;
The cradle o'er the sleeping child
Became a leafy screen."
In chapter second of the "Supernaturalism" we have a whimsical story about a certain "Aunt Morse," who lived in a town adjoining Amesbury:—
"After the death of Aunt Morse no will was found, though it was understood before her decease that such a document was in the hands of Squire S., one of her neighbors. One cold winter evening, some weeks after her departure, Squire S. sat in his parlor, looking over his papers, when, hearing some one cough in a familiar way, he looked up, and saw before him a little crooked old woman, in an oil-nut colored woollen frock, blue and white tow and linen apron, and striped blanket, leaning her sharp, pinched face on one hand, while the other supported a short black tobacco pipe, at which she was puffing in the most vehement and spiteful manner conceivable.
"The squire was a man of some nerve; but his first thought was to attempt an escape, from which he was deterred only by the consideration that any effort to that effect would necessarily bring him nearer to his unwelcome visitor.
"'Aunt Morse,' he said at length, 'for the Lord's sake, get right back to the burying-ground! What on earth are you here for?'
"The apparition took her pipe deliberately from her mouth, and informed him that she came to see justice done with her will; and that nobody need think of cheating her, dead or alive. Concluding her remark with a shrill emphasis, she replaced her pipe, and puffed away with renewed vigor. Upon the squire's promising to obey her request, she refilled her pipe, which she asked him to light, and then took her departure."
"Elderly people in this region," says our author, "yet tell marvellous stories of General M., of Hampton, N. H., especially of his league with the devil, who used to visit him occasionally in the shape of a small man in a leathern dress. The general's house was once burned, in revenge, as it is said, by the fiend, whom the former had outwitted. He had agreed, it seems, to furnish the general with a boot full of gold and silver poured annually down the chimney. The shrewd Yankee cut off, on one occasion, the foot of the boot, and the devil kept pouring down the coin from the chimney's top, in a vain attempt to fill it, until the room was literally packed with the precious metal. When the general died, he was laid out, and put in a coffin, as usual; but, on the day of the funeral, it was whispered about that his body was missing; and the neighbors came to the charitable conclusion that the enemy had got his own at last."
It should be understood that the state of society which produced such superstitions and legends as the foregoing lingers now only in secluded corners of New England. The railroad, the newspaper, and the influx of foreign population, have combined to frighten away ghost, conjurer, and witch, or to drive them up into the mountainous districts. There are still plenty of quaint and picturesque old Puritan farmers; and their mythology is antique and rusty enough, to be sure. But the folk-lore of the early days,—where is it? Let the shriek of the steam-demon answer, or that powerful magician, the "Spirit of the Age," who, ten thousand times divided, and slyly hidden in plethoric leathern mail bags, daily rushes into the remotest nooks and corners of the land, there to enter into the nooks and corners of the mind of man. The "Spirit of the Age" has exorcised the spirits of the ingle and the forest.