Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: May 3, 2025
Old dismal nursery stories and all the witch lore of boyhood came back to his memory; and he crept to his bed like a criminal to the gallows, half afraid to fall asleep lest his mysterious companion should take a fancy to transform him into a horse, get him shod at the smithy, and ride him to a witch-meeting.
There had, so tradition said, once been a witch-meeting on its banks, of six little old women in short, sky-blue cloaks; and if a drunken teamster could be credited, a ghost was once seen bobbing for eels under Country Bridge.
So the miserable sinner was prevailed with to mount into the air, and career among the clouds; and he is proved to have been present at a witch-meeting as far off as Falmouth, on the very same night that his next neighbors saw him, with his rheumatic stoop, going in at his own door.
Old dismal nursery stories and all the witch lore of boyhood came back to his memory; and he crept to his bed like a criminal to the gallows, half afraid to fall asleep lest his mysterious companion should take a fancy to transform him into a horse, get him shod at the smithy, and ride him to a witch-meeting.
Hale, in his account of the proceedings, says: "When George Burroughs was tried, seven or eight of the confessors, severally called, said, they knew the said Burroughs; and saw him at a Witch-meeting at the Village; and heard him exhort the company to pull down the Kingdom of God and set up the Kingdom of the Devil.
One of the wildest, and at the same time the best-accredited, accounts stated it to be an original and authentic portrait of the evil one, taken at a witch-meeting near Salem, and that its strong and terrible resemblance had been confirmed by several of the confessing wizards and witches at their trial in open court.
There had, so tradition said, once been a witch-meeting on its banks, of six little old women in short, sky-blue cloaks; and if a drunken teamster could be credited, a ghost was once seen bobbing for eels under Country Bridge.
But I am often struck, especially in the shorter tales, of which I am now chiefly speaking, with a kind of small ingenuity, a taste for conceits and analogies, which bears more particularly what is called the fanciful stamp. The finer of the shorter tales are redolent of a rich imagination. "Had Goodman Brown fallen asleep in the forest and only dreamed a wild dream of witch-meeting?
In one of its rooms hung a picture so dark that when Lieutenant-Governor Hutchinson went to live there hardly anybody could say what it represented. There were hints that it was a portrait of the devil, painted at a witch-meeting near Salem, and that on the eve of disasters in the province a dreadful face had glared from the canvas.
Had Goodman Brown fallen asleep in the forest and only dreamed a wild dream of a witch-meeting? Be it so if you will; but, alas! it was a dream of evil omen for young Goodman Brown. A stern, a sad, a darkly meditative, a distrustful, if not a desperate man did he become from the night of that fearful dream.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking