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Updated: June 16, 2025
The place where the wood-pile lay was slightly higher than the barnyard and was the first dry ground to appear in the almost universal slush and mud. Delightful memories are associated with this sunny spot and with a pond which appeared as if by some conjury, on the very field where I had husked the down-row so painfully in November.
By virtue of a special conjury residing in these waking dreams of his, the little man peering nearsightedly at the shimmering white beach saw instead of a beach the first heavy fall of snow upon the withers of the Green Mountains; saw not unchanging stretches of sand but a blanket of purest fleece, frilled and flounced and scrolled after the drift wind had billowed it up in low places but otherwise smooth and fair except where it had been rutted by sleigh runners and packed by the snow-boltered hoofs of bay Dobbins and sorrel Dollies, the get of Morgan stock.
If one wished to cause a satiated lover to return, the old woman rolled a bronze ball which she carried in her bosom, asking Venus to cause the lover to roll in over the threshold of the door in the same manner, and if the conjury produced no effect, the wax image of the person beloved was thrown into the brazier while asking the gods to melt the frozen heart with love even as the figure melted.
Priesthood works out its task, age after age: now smoothing penitent death-beds, consecrating graves! feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, incarnating the Christian precepts, in an age of rapine and homicide, doing a thousand deeds of love and charity among the obscure and forsaken deeds of which there shall never be human chronicle, but a leaf or two, perhaps, in the recording angel's book; hiving precious honey from the few flowers of gentle, art which bloom upon a howling wilderness; holding up the light of science over a stormy sea; treasuring in convents and crypts the few fossils of antique learning which become visible, as the extinct Megatherium of an elder world reappears after the gothic deluge; and now, careering in helm and hauberk with the other ruffians, bandying blows in the thickest of the fight, blasting with bell, book, and candle its trembling enemies, while sovereigns, at the head of armies, grovel in the dust and offer abject submission for the kiss of peace; exercising the same conjury over ignorant baron and cowardly hind, making the fiction of apostolic authority to bind and loose, as prolific in acres as the other divine right to have and hold; thus the force of cultivated intellect, wielded by a chosen few and sanctioned by supernatural authority, becomes as potent as the sword.
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