University of Virginia Library

28. CHAPTER XXVIII.

Mr. Pynchon had been absent from the settlement but a
few days when symptoms of amendment appeared in the
sad case of Mary Parsons. For months she had not spoken
of her child, but, at last, her memory and reason seemed to
return together, and as the fact that she was the mother of
a child that had once slept upon her bosom had been fixed
upon her mind during some lucid moment, she turned
to look upon the long alienated baby, as if she had just
awaked from the sleep of an hour. She gave Hugh a
pleasant smile as he bent over her, and asked him for the
object for which she sought; and he—unwittingly and with
much agitation—told her where the child was, and how
long and for what cause it had been away from her. The
facts were too much for her weak brain, and, under their
pressure, she relapsed again into an insane mood, in which
her child divided her wandering and wayward fancies with
her mother's eyes, and in which, in some way, the two
became united by a thousand conflicting or harmonious
associations.

Hardly a minute passed that did not hear her calling for
her child; and, as darkness closed down upon her memory,
and the path between it and Goody Tomson's cabin was
blotted out, the child was elevated by her imagination to
direct companionship with the beautiful eyes from which
had descended upon her the only calm and comfort she had
enjoyed during her long illness. Then came between her
eyes and the double vision the old tormenting shapes with
which her long struggle had been held, and her efforts to

reach her baby and reclaim it to her arms became so pitiful,
that Hugh could only look upon her and weep.

At last, he sent for Mary Holyoke, and asked for her
advice in regard to restoring her child to her. The pleadings
of the poor insane mother touched Mary Holyoke's
heart at once, and she begged Hugh to go to Goody Tomson,
and bid her bring the child. The kind-hearted nurse
was soon on the way, in obedience to the summons, and
Hugh walked back in her company, with a vague hope in
his breast that the child would carry to its stricken mother
a soothing if not a healing power. As the pair softly
entered the cabin, they found Mary Holyoke sitting at the
side of the poor patient, who, as if conscious of the presence
of her old friend and mistress, had fallen into a quiet sleep.
The child, too, was sleeping in its nurse's arms, and both
the women—mothers as they were—by an impulse that
sprang in each alike from simple nature, moved to lay the
little one by its mother's side. The clothes were softly
turned down, and the baby's head—once more at its home
—pressed its mother's arm; and the little one smiled with
a sweetness that thrilled the trembling Hugh to the very
depths of his heart, as it composed itself, from a momentary
disturbance, to a sounder sleep.

It was a moment of profound excitement. The cabin
was as still as if there were not a breathing inhabitant
within it, and every waking eye was upon the sleeping
mother and child. Half an hour—an hour—passed thus,
when Mary, who had enjoyed the best sleep that had
visited her for several days, opened her eyes, and again
called for her child.

“Hush!” said Mary Holyoke, softly, “the baby is sleeping
on your arm. Do not wake it!”

The mother turned her large eyes, full of wonder and
strange curiosity, upon the child, and, without speaking
a word, gazed at it until the big tears brimmed her eyes,

and ran down upon her pillow, drop by drop, as if an
accumulated flood had found vent, and were pouring forth
its waters, alike unbidden and uncontrollable. Then she
carefully put her face down to the little head that lay
pillowed upon her arm, and pressed her lips upon it with a
gentle power, and, from the recesses of her ardent nature,
poured out upon it, in a fervent and silent effluence, the
first healthy outgoings of a mother's love. The room was
silent still, save as Hugh gave expression to his feelings in
occasional sobs. Goody Tomson had, as noiselessly as
possible, gone out of the cabin, and seating herself upon a
rough bench at the door, given herself up to a hearty fit
of crying.

The sleep of the unconscious cause of all this emotion
began gradually to release its bands, and the child opened
its eyes for the first time upon its mother's face. It looked
but a moment, when its face became suffused with fright,
and, closing its eyes again, it burst into a fit of crying as
vigorous as it was pitiful.

Mary Holyoke watched with intense interest the effect
of this development upon the mother, and was pained to
witness a strange wild change coming upon her countenance,
and breaking in a more powerful expression from her eye.
The mother looked at her weeping child for a minute, then
pushed it from her violently, and exclaimed, “That is not
my child—take it away; and don't let Goody Tomson
bring any more of her brats here to cheat me with!”

“My dear!” said Mary Holyoke, “this is your own sweet
child. It has grown so much that you do not know it.”

The only reply made to this address was a stare of mingled
incredulity and resentment, from which the poor patient's
benefactress shrank with a sigh of distress. Goody Tomson
no sooner saw her little protegé pushed rudely aside
than she seized the treasure, and, hugging it to her bosom,
retired to a distant part of the room, whither its mother's

eyes followed her with an expression of mingled intelligence
and fatuity that crushed the newly springing hopes in
Hugh's bosom, and showed how thoroughly her mind had
been committed to its shadowy keepers.

Goody Tomson was soon joined by Mary Holyoke and
Hugh, and a consultation was held in regard to the proper
course of procedure. Mary Holyoke could not give up the
idea that, in some way, the presence of the child would do
the mother good; how, it did not appear, but so it seemed
to her. The nurse was not so sure, from the fact that her
sympathies attached rather to the child than the mother.
Hugh was willing to do what the others thought for the
best, and, as they could not agree, it was finally decided
that Goody Tomson should return to her cabin with the
child, and, if Mary should again call for it, in such a manner
as in any way to show that she wished to see it—the
little one she had disowned—it should be sent for.

As the nurse wrapped her little charge in a blanket, to
guard it from the chill of the evening which was approaching,
and undertook to pass out of the door, she was arrested
by Mary with the words, “Where are you going with that
child?”

“Home,” replied the nurse.

“I thought Mistress Holyoke said it was my child,” said
the mother.

“But you said it wasn't,” replied Goody Tomson, very
bluntly.

“I don't know,” responded Mary, while a shadow of
doubt passed over her face, “but she never told me a lie
before. Bring the baby here again.”

The babe, at Mary Holyoke's request, was brought back,
and exhibited to the mother, who made no effort to take it
in her arms, and was content to look at it in the nurse's
possession.

“Don't let her take it away!” exclaimed the mother to

Mary Holyoke, with a beseeching expression that seemed
the very opposite of that which she had previously exhibited.

“She shall not go!” replied the lady, with an affectionate
and decided impulse.

It was then arranged that Mary Holyoke should return
home, and send word to Goody Tomson's cabin—still in the
keeping of Peter Trimble—that that young man would be
obliged for the night to dispense with the presence of the
mistress of the house, and discharge the duties of a nurse as
well as protector to her little family of children. After
giving Hugh and the nurse some general directions touching
the management of affairs, Mary Holyoke bent her
steps homeward to attend to the duties of her own household.

After her departure, the patient lay in deep silence, as if
absorbed in thought, and Hugh and the nurse kept at a
distance, hoping that she might fall asleep. But not a
motion was made that she did not see. The babe which
the nurse had succeeded in keeping unusually quiet during
her presence in the house, occasionally nestled uneasily in
her arms, and gave utterance to a low cry; and at such
times the mother raised herself upon her elbows in the bed,
and gazed upon it with a painful intensity.

At last, Hugh brought to Mary her supper, but not
a mouthful passed her lips. She shook her head at every
offer of food, and kept her eyes fastened upon her child as
the nurse fed it at her own breast, or walked across the
cabin with it closely folded in her arms, or hummed a
drowsy tune in its ears, or whispered to it in sweet and
soothing words.

Hugh and the nurse ate their supper in silence, and soon
afterwards the baby fell asleep. As the two were sitting
at a small fire that had been kindled upon the hearth, alternately
looking at the flickering flame and the patient at the

opposite side of the room, the wind began to moan dismally,
and the rain to patter upon the cabin roof, while, at brief
intervals, a drop fell intact through the short chimney, and
died with an angry pang upon the coals, as if it had been
stung. Then the rising wind wailed more and more dreadfully
among the trees, and roared in and around the chimney—sometimes
sweeping the gradually increasing rain
against the window panes, persistently and with spasmodic
reinforcements of power, and then retiring, and roaring
away among the woods; sometimes pouncing upon the
cabin like an army of shadowy beasts, shaking the door as
if human hands had hold of it, rattling the window, tossing
the rain down the chimney in showers, scrambling over the
loose sticks upon the wood pile, and, at last, tired and
baffled, scampering off over the leaves to make way for its
successors; sometimes making a feint, and, wheeling around
the corner, spending its strength at an unexpected point—
at last falling lifeless in a lull through which the rain came
down steadily, as if it had been waiting the result of the
wind's manœuvres. In a brief hour, a still, sombre day had
descended into a wet, wild night.

Hugh sat for a while and listened to the dreary music
of the storm, and then barred his door, and made fast the
windows, so that they should not rattle, and stuffed old
garments under the door to keep out the driving rain, and
set a pail to catch the water that began to fall, drop by
drop, from a leak in the roof. After these preparations for
a stormy night had been made, he resumed his seat at the
fire, and, oppressed with weariness and long watching,
began to doze.

The dropping into the pail quickened its measured fall,
until each drop struck the surface with a metallic, musical
clink, that might, in that weird and dreary room, have
been mistaken for an elfin bell, calling the sprites of the
woods to a revel upon the midnight hearth.

Hugh opened and closed his eyes wearily, and the nurse
nodded over the baby in her low chair; but upon the bed,
which, in their weariness and drowsiness, they had momentarily
forgotten, lay a brain teeming with fancies born
equally of the storm without and the storm within.

As the watchers became still, Mary waited for a noisy
blast of the storm, and then raised herself upon her elbows
in the bed, and sought for a glimpse of the child. Then, in
another blast, she settled upon the bed again. This movement
was several times repeated. At last, she subsided into
silence.

The blast rose and fell upon her ears, the rain poured
ceaselessly upon the roof, and the water drops clinked faster
and faster in the pail, as if the fairy bell had been changed
to a set of silver chimes, sending forth their liquid music
from towers that swayed with the sound. The flickering fire,
the roaring wind, the sweeping rain, the lively chimes, the
strange child, and the twilight of the room, formed a combination
of circumstances and influences which harmonized
marvellously with her mood of mind, and filled her with
a strange, delicious joy, that she had not experienced for
many months. She seemed to breathe the native atmosphere
of delirium, and to find her mind, for the first time since
her sickness, adapted to, and in accordance with the circumstances
that formed the externals of her life. In this mood,
she turned her gaze upwards, and never had such a sweet
vision of her mother's eyes smiled upon her. No cloud
obstructed, no shape intervened. Calm and sweet—full of
love and tender sadness—those orbs which had watched
over her infancy, which had beamed in upon the darkness
and sorrows of her childhood's dreams—those eyes met hers,
and, beneath them, as if folded to a shadowy bosom, was
her baby—her baby—a little cherub, wrapped in rosy
sleep.

As she gazed and gazed again, and drank in the beauty

and the blessedness of this dear vision, the wind seemed to
lull in the forest around, and the clinking water changed to
a low, sweet measure, like bells heard in the desert, or the
dreamy tinkle of flocks grazing on the sunny slopes of summer
hills.

As she lay thus in beatific possession, through what
seemed to her almost an age of bliss, the wind began to rise
again, and, roaring in the chimney, driving the rain upon
the roof and walls of the cabin, and screaming among the
forest branches, brought clouds before her mental sight, and
shut out the vision that had so long held her in sweet
enthralment. The first and only shape that interposed was
that of the strange child. She changed the position of her
head, but the stranger came between. She tried to sweep
it away with her hand, but she could not reach it. Then,
slowly raising herself upon her elbows again, she looked at
the nurse, still nodding over her little charge in the corner,
and, settling back to her place, she very softly pronounced
Hugh's name.

Hugh, long accustomed to watching and sleeping lightly,
was at her bedside in an instant.

“Tell Goody Tomson,” said Mary, in a low, composed
voice, “to lay the child on my bed, over upon the other
side, and to lie down herself upon the bunk, and get some
rest.”

“Do you think you had better have the child on your
bed?” inquired Hugh, doubtingly, and with an effort in the
faint light to get the expression of her eye.

“Why—isn't it my child?” said Mary.

“Oh! certainly it is, Mary,” replied Hugh, with all the
tenderness and persuasiveness he could throw into his voice;
“certainly it is, Mary—it is your child and mine.”

“Well—can't I have my own child?” inquired Mary.

There was something in the tone of her voice—something
in her manner—that filled him with misgivings and fears,

but he could not tell what it was; so he went to Goody
Tomson and knelt down by her side, and whispered in her
ear the substance of Mary's wishes and directions.

As he knelt there, the rain came down freshly upon the
roof, and the clinking drops struck the pail with a rapid and
irregular fall—a wild and hurried tone—as if the bells of a
city were ringing the alarm of a pressing danger. They
almost spoke—and bounded up from the surface upon
which they fell, and broke into strange articulations, and
sharply modulated shouts and cries that had their echoes.
No ear heard or noticed them but Mary's. To her, they
spoke a plain language; and she wondered that Hugh and
Goody Tomson did not hear it; and, as they whispered together—cautiously,
so that they might not waken the babe
—she watched them closely, to see whether they had not
taken the alarm.

Goody Tomson, oppressed with sleep and not doubting
that Hugh would look well after the child, seemed glad to
accede to Mary's wishes; and, taking the little one to the
bed, gently released it from her own arms, and deposited
it upon a pillow on the side opposite to its mother. The
sleepy nurse did not see the glaring eyes that scanned her
every movement, and Hugh was engaged in watching the
child which, though his own, he had hitherto hardly known.

When the child was covered, the pair went on tiptoe
back to the hearth, and Hugh, pointing to the bunk at the
side of the room, sent the nurse to her rest. Then, adding
two or three sticks to the fire, he stretched himself in his
chair to sleep. Ten minutes had hardly elapsed when both
Hugh and the nurse were soundly snoring. But the storm
still continued without, roaring and sweeping around the
cabin, and masking if not entirely drowning the minor
sounds within.

Within a few minutes, the cabin had grown solemn to its
only wakeful tenant. The roof had swollen with rain until

the leak was so small that the drops came in at long and
measured intervals upon a body of water whose increased
depth gave forth a sad strange resonance, like the tolling
of a lonely bell.

Mary lay in death-like stillness listening to the knell, and
revolving in her confused mind a purpose which had crept
into it and fastened itself there. Once more she looked
upwards—long, patiently, and earnestly—but she could see
nothing but the strange child. Then slowly, she turned
her head upon the pillow, until her eyes were glued to the
little sleeper. She watched the babe for a few minutes—
all the time keeping distinctly in her sharpened apprehensions
the rhythmic respirations of its nurse and father, and
alive to every movement they might make—and then, as a
serpent creeps toward the victim it has charmed, she passed
her emaciated hand towards the child.

With the first movement, the wind seemed to die away,
and the rain to withhold its fall upon the roof. She paused,
and the drops fell into the pail still more slowly, and with
a sadder intonation, as if they were grief-burdened, or
growing faint with despair. Between each drop, inch after
inch, the white hand slid along the sheet, coming nearer
and still nearer the unconscious babe, whose nurse seemed
to snore more loudly as the danger to her charge increased.
At length its little hand was reached, and Mary accidentally
touched it. It was soft and warm, and irritated by the
slight disturbance, the child raised it and slowly dropped
it upon that of its mother. In the utter tension of her sensibilities,
she could feel the pulsations of its heart at the
very tips of its fingers, and there was something so delicate
and sweet in its touch, something so unconscious and innocent
in its sleep, that she paused for another look in its
face. She could not be mistaken. It was the same face—
the same child—that had come between her and her own
child—it was the little impostor.

The wind came up again with a wail from the woods—
and her brain caught the impulse and the influence. Again
her hand was in motion, and onward it moved, inch by inch,
towards the babe's head—the slowly dropping water meanwhile
uttering low, tearful, pleading notes of deprecation.

Again she paused, looked towards the distant sleepers,
then towards the pail, and half rose with a sudden impulse
to move it from its place, that so its admonitions might be
silenced. Her cautiousness checked her in the act, and
again she turned to the child.

At this moment, her eye was burning with excitement,
but her hand and arm were as steady as if the nerves that
strung them were of iron. Slowly that hand passed over
the little sleeper's throat, and there, as still and rigid as the
hand of death, it paused. The conscious palm, with the
strained tendons underneath the bloodless skin, felt the
warmth of the little chin and neck and breast, like a palpable
emanation or atmosphere, as it hung above them at
scarcely a hair's escape from contact; but still it paused.
Then, from the far northeast, Mary heard a blast stirring
among the trees. On it came, roaring and wailing and
screaming through the night, until it reached the cabin,
where, bellowing in the chimney and sweeping over the
roof, it drowned all other noise without and within.

At the height of the confusion, that pale hand, with the
grip of a vice, was fastened upon the little sleeper's throat.
Not a breath did it draw—not an utterance did it make
—afterwards. Its hands instinctively tugged at Mary's
wrist, in the vain effort to tear it away, and its chest heaved
in quick throes, and its legs were drawn up in struggling
convulsions. These grew fainter and fainter until the
victim's eyes—strained wildly open—slowly deadened into
a senseless glaze, and its soft, sweet face became turgid
and purple. At last, all was still—the babe was stone dead.
The wind died away, and the last brand had ceased to

crackle in the fire-place, and the clinking drops had forgotten
to ring their changes in the water pail. The silence
grew awful, for death, violence, madness, and sleep were
gathered in one room.

The murderess clung to the little neck that had grown
long and lank within her grasp, until she began to feel the
chill that was creeping into her victim's frame, and then she
slowly and cautiously withdrew her hand and covered the
body as the nurse had left it covered. In an instant a wild
thrill of exultation passed through her brain—a strange,
mad joy—whose manifestation in some manner she had no
power to repress, and she shivered the silence with a laugh
so loud, and meaningless, and long continued, that it seemed
to the suddenly awakened sleepers more like the laugh of
a demon than of a human being. Hugh leaped to the bed-side,
and found her sitting up at the end of the bed, madly
laughing still. He no sooner appeared than Mary pointed
to the dead child, and went into renewed convulsions of
her terrible merriment.

“O Mary! O God! Oh! what shall I do! what shall I
do!” exclaimed Hugh, bursting into a wild cry of anguish,
as he dimly saw the child, and placed his hurried and
trembling hand upon its cold little face.

At this time the drowsy nurse stumbled blindly towards
the bed, wondering what had occurred, and more than half
forgetful that she was not in her own cabin. She put her
hand upon the child, dropped to her knees to look at it
in the dull twilight of the room, felt its neck, and then
looked at the mother, whose laughter had been arrested by
Hugh's exclamations of terror and distress. The terrible
fact stole into her apprehension by degrees, and, sinking
upon the floor, the simple and devoted creature clung to
Hugh's knees, and gave utterance to such exclamations of
distress as burst naturally from her heart—bemoaning the
hour and day she ever brought the little innocent back, and

insisting that God would never forgive her, and that she
could never forgive herself for the act. She might have
known a crazy mother would kill the child, she said.

Hugh disengaged himself from her, and passing around
the bed to Mary, put his arm around her, and looking in
her wild eyes a moment, hid his face upon her wasted
bosom, and crying convulsively said, “Oh, Mary, Mary,
Mary, Mary! you don't know what you've done!”

“Yes, I do, too; I've killed that woman's ugly brat, and
if she don't leave the cabin and stop troubling you and me
in this way, I'll kill her.”

“Why, Mary! it was not her child—it was yours! Oh, dear!
what will become of us now!” and Hugh—poor, worn, weary,
and despairing fellow—cried as if his heart were wholly broken.

Goody Tomson was not long in making her determination.
Throwing her shawl over her head, as the most expeditious
way of covering herself, she unbarred the door,
and, before Hugh became conscious of what she was doing,
was on her way to give the alarm—her own heart so full of
alarm that she flew rather than ran along the muddy path.
The storm lay spent upon the ground, the old moon with
inverted horn hung over the woods, the wolf's long howl
from the eastern hill came drearily down into the valley,
as the woman ran screaming “Murder! murder!” from
house to house.

Not until she had run nearly the length of the village
could she be stopped, so as to direct the steps of the attendance
she sought. As soon as the first fact of the case
was learned, nearly all the men of the settlement, who had
risen and hastily dressed themselves, were on their way to
Hugh's cabin. Few of them could disguise their fears, as
they turned out upon this errand. The old stories that
clung around Mary all recurred, and, aside from them, the
first murder in the settlement was something well calculated
to shock and sicken.

While Hugh was engaged in the endeavor to restore
composure and some degree of rational consciousness to his
wife, he heard the tramp of approaching feet, and the confusion
of excited voices. On they came, along the road;
they entered the yard, threw open the door of the cabin,
and, in a few minutes, the room was crowded. All were
there—friends and foes. Conspicuously among the figures
moving around the room was that of the minister, who,
instead of endeavoring to quell the excitement, was engaged
with the constable in opening drawers, prying into nooks
and crannies, lifting loose planks upon the floor, and making
inquiries of this one and that, in a low voice, and acting in
a manner that showed that he regarded the murder as the
key to his own deliverance. Heaven, in his belief, had descended
in judgment, and Satan had completed the ruin of
his deluded devotee.

During all the first of the disturbance, Mary sat still upon
the bed, leaning upon Hugh's shoulder, and looking wildly
around upon the excited assemblage which soon filled the
room to suffocation.

Peering through the doorway into the morning twilight,
she could see others coming in the distance—men, women,
and children—some running at the top of their speed, some
walking, some shouting, some pointing towards the cabin,
and all pressing forward with a fearful earnestness towards
her.

Then rude men gathered round her, and asked her harsh
questions, and told her that she would be hung; while
half-dressed women, with their hair upon their shoulders,
came rushing excitedly in, and, pressing to the bed-side,
burst into wild lamentations over the little body which, in
life, they had accused of looking like a cat; or gave vent
to their excitement in upbraidings of the poor mother.
What was passing in her shattered spirit, what meaning
she attached to the confusion around her, what forebodings

darkled through her mental gloom, what fancies she built
up from the new materials around her—the pale faces, the
straggling hair, the confused voices, the gaze of menace,
curiosity, and fear, the fierce reproaches—cannot be pictured,
but, in her fright—in her trouble—there was one face which
she sought, and which was long in coming.

At last, by the operation of the powerful influences
around her, the cloud of her delirium was borne slowly
away from her spirit—or repelled, perhaps, by her spirit,
under the action of the new and terrible stimulus—and
consciousness swept over her with a shudder as cold as that
of death. The longed for face appeared at length, and the
poor infanticide burst with an appealing cry of distress from
the arms of her husband, and hid her face upon Mary Holyoke's
bosom, who, too weak with excitement to stand, fell
back into a chair, and received her old ward upon her
knees.

Mr. Holyoke, touched by this scene, ordered the room to
be cleared, and the door to be shut. Goody Tomson had
returned, and was weeping over her cold little nursling, and
Mr. Moxon, Deacon Chapin, the constable, and two or three
of the principal women of the place remained, while the
others gathered into knots outside, or took their way
silently and solemnly homewards. Then Hugh and Goody
Tomson—in tears and terror—told the story faithfully and
truly—Hugh simply insisting on Mary's insanity, and Mary
hearing every word, as the awful fact grew slowly into her
convictions.

Then the minister and the other men present drew themselves
apart, and soon became excited, so that none of their
conversation escaped the ears of the others. “I tell you,”
said Mr. Moxon, “the day of retribution has come. The
tormentor of my children has been pointed out to you and
to me, by this shocking and most unnatural murder. The
witchcraft is the primary crime, it is the crime which procured

this crime, and she should be arrested for witchcraft
as well as murder.”

“I do not see very well how her arrest for murder can
be hindered, in the state of feeling which exists here now,
in the absence of the magistrate,” said Mr. Holyoke, “but
I do object to loading her down with the odium of witchcraft
when she is brought before her judges for the only
crime she has been guilty of.”

“How do you know it is the only crime she has been
guilty of?” inquired the minister, sharply.

“By the same means by which I know you to be a monomaniac,”
replied Mr. Holyoke firmly, “and, in this matter,
I beg you will not be so unreasonable as to provoke me to
give your insanity less consideration than I do hers.”

The minister's mind rebounded from this rock into the
region of doubt and uncertainty again, and he fell to his
usual resort of walking to and fro across the cabin. At
length, he withdrew a package from his pocket, and, calling
Deacon Chapin's attention to it, opened it in Mr. Holyoke's
presence, and asked the former if he had ever seen
anything like its contents before.

The Deacon reluctantly replied that he had, and then
Mr. Holyoke took from it a piece of birch bark, with a
sentence written upon it, in the handwriting of that so
rudely withdrawn from Mr. Moxon's study window, on an
occasion well remembered by Deacon Chapin and the reader.

“I knew,” pursued Mr. Moxon, eyeing Mr. Holyoke
closely, as he persued the manuscript, “that if ever I could
have an opportunity, I could find in this house evidence
that Mary Parsons has had dealings with the Evil One;
and if Deacon Chapin will tell what he has seen, he will
identify that, and all the manuscripts I have in my hand, as
the product of Satan, or his emissary. But perhaps” (added
the minister in a tone of irony) Deacon Chapin is a monomaniac.”

“This is too solemn a place for jesting,” said Mr. Holyoke,
bitterly, “but if the devil writes as bad a hand as this, and
can afford no better paper, he is too ignorant and too poor
to do much damage among people possessing common sense,
and decent stationery.”

Saying this, he was about to turn away, when Deacon
Chapin interposed, and said that he considered it no more
than proper, as he had been alluded to, to say that while he
had seen some things connected with a similar manuscript
which were wholly unaccountable, and while, at that time,
he had supposed it in some manner connected with witchcraft,
he had been inclined to reconsider his conclusion.
So far as Mary Parsons was concerned, he saw no way to
get along with her but to send her to the Bay, if she could
be carried there. It was a sad case—a terrible judgment.

Holyoke listened impatiently, as the minister and the
deacon approached the bed. “There,” said he, as he laid
his hand upon the cold forehead of the dead child, and
turned to his two companions, “there is another victim of
law without justice. Its mother's insanity dates from her
trial for slander, and the full measure of horrible evils, of
which this is but one, has been, and is to be, turned out by
such clumsy machinery as men make when they take the
work out of the hands of Christianity, and endeavor to
regulate altogether minor and subordinate social evils.”

Mr. Moxon was too blind to see the full force of this
cutting and unanswerable rebuke, but Deacon Chapin saw
it, and felt it, and never forgot it.

During this brief side scene, Mary Holyoke and Hugh
and his poor wife were weeping together, in one touching
group. The infanticide had rarely seemed more natural and
rational than at that moment, and new strength had taken
possession of her. She sat up in her chair, and, as her old
mistress, kindly and with many tears, and with such words
of comfort and counsel as she could command, told her of

her probable fate—of the trial which awaited her, and its
uncertain issue—the old, strong spirit swelled within her,
and, grappling, as it were, with her destiny, she exclaimed,
rising firmly to her feet, “Let them kill me! I am ready!
It will be no comfort to me to live, and I am nothing but
a curse to the only man I love on earth!”

Hugh begged her not to talk so, but she told him to be
silent, and, turning to the constable, asked him when he
would be ready to start, stating that she should never be
as well prepared as during that very hour.

Why pause to tell of the events that quickly followed, like
shadows passing the vision in a dream;—of the hurried inquest,
the burial, the throngs of curious eyes that peered
into and around the cabin during the day, the hasty preparations
for the journey, the farewells, the prayers, the
final departure, the winding of the cavalcade up the hill
along the Bay Path—the saddest and yet the most excited
cavalcade that had ever trodden it.

It was a terrible journey for an invalid like Mary to undertake.
She was seated upon a horse, behind her husband,
and supported herself by leaning upon and clasping him.
As she turned to take a farewell view of the valley and
village, she knew that she should never see them again,
and only hoped that she should die before she reached the
Bay.

The party was made up of the constable, Mr. Moxon,
Mr. Holyoke, three or four other men who adopted the
occasion and company for errands of their own, and Goody
Tomson, who, with Hugh, were the important witnesses.
Mr. Moxon went down determined to have her tried for
witchcraft, but, in Holyoke's company, preserved silence in
regard to his designs. The party were more than a week
upon the way. The prisoner grew weaker from day to day.
Several times she fainted upon her horse, and once fell to
the ground, dragging Hugh with her. At last, more dead

than alive, she arrived at Boston, and was taken directly to
the lodgings of the magistrate.

The distress into which the case threw him may well be
imagined. His first thought related to the sentence which
he had administered to her, in which had originated her
sickness and her sin. He never had thought of its first
effect without a pang, he had never heard of her sickness
without sad regrets, and the last blow stunned him. It was
this event which burst in upon his own personal trials, which
thrilled with horror the General Court, and spread a sudden
excitement throughout the Bay Settlements. It was this
event which afterwards gave a new coloring to his own case,
and helped to involve him in his deepest humiliation. The
grand crisis in his affairs had arrived.