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Living, sane, and scientifically trained men now, not to speak of ingenious, and intelligent, if superstitious observers in the past, and Catholic gleaners of contemporary evidence for saintly miracle, and witnesses, judges, and juries in trials for witchcraft, are undeniably all 'in the same tale'.
Nor could the end be foreseen. If such considerations weighed down the spirits of the most intelligent men, imagine the fears of frail, nervous women, of the children, the wild panic of the superstitious negroes to whom science explained nothing. To their excited minds the earthquake was due directly either to the action of a malignant, personal devil, or of an angry God.
"Excuse me; I have no desire to be ridiculed as a superstitious dreamer, nor, on the other hand, could I ask you to accept on my affirmation what you would hold to be incredible without the evidence of your own senses.
A tremendous sea pooped them, broke the rudder, and jammed it immovable, and flooded the deck. Then wild with superstitious terror some of them came round Gerard. "Here is the cause of all," they cried. "He has never invoked a single saint. He is a heathen; here is a pagan aboard." "Alas, good friends, say not so," said Gerard, his teeth chattering with cold and fear.
People who ought to have known better defied the cholera in excess of rioting, while those of another turn of mind gave way to superstitious fears, and as soon as they felt the first symptoms of the disease fled to the cold, damp churches and wasted in prayer upon their knees the few precious hours which, spent in a warm bed and under the influence of proper remedies, might have ensured them the salvation of at least their temporal life.
He knew Fletcher's superstitious tendency, and it cannot be questioned that the threat was the last feeble flash of his prankfulness. The faithful valet replied in consternation that he had not understood one word of what his Lordship had been saying. "Oh! my God!" was the reply, "then all is lost, for it is now too late! Can it be possible you have not understood me!"
She was not devoid of the superstitious feelings of the age, and had heard before of ghostly tappings that were said to be a harbinger of coming death or misfortune. Tap! tap! tap! The sound continued with a ceaseless regularity, and then came other strange sounds of wrenching and tearing. These were perhaps not quite so ghostly, but equally alarming. What could it be?
The superstitious still have half an idea that Mafuie is down below Samoa somewhere; and that the earth has a long handle there, like a walking-stick, which Mafuie gives a shake now and then. It was common for them to say, when they felt the shock of an earthquake, "Thanks to Ti'iti'i, that Mafuie has only one arm: if he had two, what a shake he would give!"
But she, who adored her son Gerard, then in his tenth year, and of delicate health, had sacrificed everything to the boy from a kind of maternal chasteness and a superstitious fear that she might lose him should she set another affection and another duty in her life.
Some are so obstinately superstitious that they will wear their upper garment of some coarse dog's hair stuff, and that next their skin as soft as silk: but others on the contrary will have linen frocks outermost, and their shirts of wool, or hair. Some again will not touch a piece of money, though they make no scruple of the sin of drunkenness, and the lust of the flesh.
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