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The practice of charms, or what is popularly called "trying projects," is still, to some extent, continued in New England. The inimitable description which Burns gives of similar practices in his Halloween may not in all respects apply to these domestic conjurations; but the following needs only the substitution of apple-seeds for nuts:
The pallid face floated from them through the grape-scented mist, and Molly's call brought no answer except the cry of a whip-poor-will from the thicket. A week later Jim Halloween stopped with a bit of news at Bottom's Ordinary, where old Adam Doolittle dozed under the mulberry tree in a rush chair which had been brought over in his son's oxcart. "Have you all heard that our Mr.
But there was no doubt of one thing, that our Halloween at Westover was a famous little party. "How do you all feel about it?" asked Barbara, sitting down on the hearth in the brown room, before the embers, and throwing the nuts she had picked up about the carpet into the coals. We had carried the supper-dishes away into the out-room, and set them on a great spare table that we kept there.
"No, I haven't changed, Mr. Halloween." He sighed not passionately, but with a resigned and sentimental regret. "Well, in that case, it's a pity I've wasted so much time wantin' you, I reckon," he rejoined. "It ain't sensible to want what you can't have, an I've always tried to be sensible, seein' I'm a farmer. If I hadn't set my fancy on you I'd have waited on Blossom Revercomb as likely as not."
Of course I must have been deceived; nobody was near me: my imagination had played me a trick, or else there was more truth than poetry in the tradition that Halloween is the carnival-time of disembodied spirits. It did not occur to me at the time that a stumble is held by the superstitious Irish to be an evil omen, and had I remembered it it would only have been to laugh at it.
The rector thinks that I'll marry him and turn pious and take to Dorcas societies, and Jim Halloween thinks I'll marry him and grow thrifty and take to turkey raising and you believe in the bottom of your heart that in the end I'll fall into your arms and find happiness with your mother. But you're wrong all all and I shan't do any of the things you expect of me.
At last the day of the Halloween party rolled round. "Well," said her uncle, as he sat down to the breakfast table and waited for her to set on the morning meal, "I suppose you're getting all your fixings ready to have a big time with the young folks to-night?" Before she could answer, there was the postman's whistle at the door.
Then it occurred to her that it must be near midnight, that her companions of other days were in the midst of their Halloween games in the big house on the hill. Only the little brook at the rear of her uncle's garden separated the grounds. Some subtle instinct which she could not follow drew Jessie's steps to the brook.
"Thar was two of us arter Minnie for the matter of that, it never entered my head to court her till I saw that Jacob Halloween yo' grandpa, Jim had begun to git soft on her. It's safer to trust another man's jedgment than yo' own I said to myself, an' I started into the race.
Mother got her fate out of a snap-dragon, and we have the identical bowl. We always used to bring it out at Christmas, when we were all at home." "O Miss Pennington! How perfectly lovely! How good you are!" "Well, I'm glad you take it so. I was afraid it was terribly meddlesome. But the fancy or the memory seized me." How wonderfully our Halloween party was turning out!
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