University of Virginia Library

THE DEVIL'S LEAP.

There is a pleasant village, not far from the capital
of New England, where the principles and feelings of
our Puritan forefathers were planted too early, and rooted
too deeply, to change with every shifting mode of
popular fashion. It was among the first hamlets settled
in the whole country. Attracted by the rich bottoms
of land indented by the sea, and intersected by
streams meandering through hill and dale, the quick-sighted
pilgrims of the Massachusetts, began a settlement
there in the very oldest Colony times.

The number of its inhabitants rapidly increased, and
speedily came to constitute one of our leading churches,
the pillars of our spiritual Israel. Actuated by the ardent
sense of religious devotion, which pervaded the
conduct of our ancestors, and which, if it sometimes
led to unseemly excesses of zeal, was yet in the main a
noble and most efficient spring of high minded action,
they did not fail to strain their utmost means in the
construction of suitable places for the worship of the
Almighty, according to the unadulterated simplicity of
primitive christian faith.

It has not always happened in our country towns that
the selection of a site for a church, or a meetinghouse
as the Puritans rather affectedly phrased it, has done
much credit to the taste of its founders. Fortunately,

in the village to which my story relates, a situation
was chosen for their church, that was eminently picturesque
and commanding.

It stood upon the brow of an undulating hill, a few
miles from the sea coast, and near to a small river, which
flowed in a winding course to the ocean. Placing
himself upon this elevated ground, in front of the principal
entrance of the church, the spectator might look
to the right hand over a large plain, covered, then, with
forest trees, and terminating in a wide amphitheatre of
distant hills. Before him he could see the river now
floating gently onward upon a smooth bed, now brawling
across the rugged projections of rock, which broke
the stream into waterfalls, or caused it to foam and
dash along in rushing rapids and turbulent eddies.
Further off, on the left, an extensive range of verdant
pastures and well watered meadows might be discerned,
sprinkled over with here and there a humble farm house
and fields of yellow waving corn, until the remote ocean
bounded the grateful prospect, which seemed to melt
into the horizon.

Although surrounded by rich and well cultivated
lands, the spot itself on which the church stood, as frequently
occurs in every part of New England, presented
a surface of solid rock, not jagged, nor split into
cliffs, nor scattered about in huge fragments, but extending
in a compact mass just along the level of the
ground, seeming as if the ribs of the earth were peeping
out from under a too scanty covering of soil. In the
neighbourhood of this romantic scene, tradition preserves
the account of a singular incident, of which,
marvellous as it is, and strange as it may therefore appear
to us doubting moderns, there still continues a
lasting monument upon the spot.

The legend has it, that, at a certain period in the olden
times of the Colony, no matter in what precise year,
a clergyman of the good old New England stock was
pastor of the little community who worshipped in the
church above described. He was devout, pious, zealous,
and throughly imbued with the spirit of religious
endurance and courage, which sustained the men of
that age through extremities of suffering, before which
feebler spirits would have blenched and sunk. So exalted
was his reputation for piety, that, if his people
might be credited, the devil himself had been worsted
in more than one fierce and desperate encounter with
the reverend pastor.

Whether the evil spirit was returning from the
nightly orgies of some dark crew of witches not far off,
or what other object he had been pursuing, I know
not; but it so befell that upon a certain occasion this
church lay in his path. As he approached, designing
to pass near it, or through it, perhaps, by some satanic
art, the voice of his dreaded foe, who was dispensing
the words of grace from the pulpit, struck upon his ear,
just as he ascended the little eminence upon which it
stood. Enraged at the sound, he leaped over the
church at one furious bound, uttering a yell of spite,
which filled the assembled congregation with astonishment
and horror.

Reader, be not incredulous of the fact; for if you
should ever chance to journey through the town of
I—, you will have ocular demonstration of its truth.
The church still lifts its venerable steeple over the selfsame
hill. The river flows tranquilly by, as before, except
that persevering industry has fixed flourishing
manufactories upon its little waterfalls. The same
agreeable rural scenery is visible all around, with the
addition of many an improvement placed there by wealth

and refinement. And upon the broad, flat surface of
the rock in front of the church, where the Enemy of
Man halted to take his tremendous leap, the print of his
footstep remains plainly discernible, stamped upon the
hard exterior by no human power, affording indubitable
evidence of the veracity of the tradition.