Produced by Robert Cicconetti, Mary Meehan and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive) DELUSION; OR THE WITCH OF NEW ENGLAND. By Eliza Buckminster Lee "There is in man a HIGHER than love of happiness: he can do without happiness, and, instead thereof, find blessedness."--SARTOR. BOSTON: HILLIARD, GRAY, AND COMPANY. 1840. Entered according to act of Congress, in the year 1839, BY HILLIARD, GRAY & CO. in the clerk's office of the district court of Massachusetts. PREFACE. The scenes and characters of this little tale are wholly fictitious. It will be found that the tragic interest that belongs to the history of the year 1692 has been very much softened in the following pages. The object of the author has not been to write a tale of witchcraft, but to show how circumstances may unfold the inward strength of a timid woman, so that she may at last be willing to die rather than yield to the delusion that would have preserved her life. If it is objected that the young and lovely are seldom accused of any witchcraft except that of bewitching hearts, we answer, that of those who were _actually_ accused, many were young; and those who maintained a firm integrity against the overwhelming power of the delusion of the period must have possessed an intellectual beauty which it would be vain to endeavor to portray. This imperfect effort is submitted with much diffidence, to the indulgence of the courteous reader. THE WITCH OF NEW ENGLAND. CHAPTER I. "Ay, call it holy ground, The soil where first they trod: They have left unstained what there they found,-- Freedom to worship God." New England scenery is said to be deficient in romantic and poetic associations. It is said that we have no ruins of ancient castles, frowning over our precipices; no time-worn abbeys and monasteries, mouldering away in neglected repose, in our valleys. It is true that the grand and beautiful places in our natural scenery are not marred by the monuments of an age of violence and wrong; and our silent valleys retain no remnant of the abodes of self-indulgent and superstitious devotion; but the descendant of the Pilgrims finds, in many of the fairest scenes of New England, some memento to carry back the imagination to those heroic and self-sacrificing ancestors. His soul is warmed and elevated when he remembers that devoted company, who were sustained amid hardship and every privation, on the trackless ocean, and in the mysterious and appalling solitudes of the forest, by a firm devotion to duty, and an all-pervading sense of the immediate presence of God.