In a note at the end of Chapter V. of "Waverley," Sir Walter Scott remarks:--"These introductory chapters have been a good deal censured as tedious and unnecessary. Yet there are circumstances recorded in them which the author has not been able to persuade himself to retract or cancel." So if, in giving certain loose hints rather than sketches of characters and manners in a very interesting town, ardently beloved by all who have ever had any near connection with it, during a former generation of its inhabitants, I should be thought to have set down too many "unconsidered trifles," I can only shelter myself under the shadow of his great name, and plead that I had not the heart to leave them out, as they occurred to my memory while writing; and however they may lack, as they necessarily must, the storied value of Sir Walter's fascinating fictions, they have at least this merit,--that every narrative and anecdote in these pages is a veritable fact. I should not wonder, however, if a couple of stories or so, which I am about to relate, were looked upon as purely fictitious by the philosophical reader. I do not pretend that the facts stated were within my own experience, only that I positively heard them related by persons of the strictest veracity, who were actual observers or actors in the transactions of which they professed to give an account. People ridicule, nowadays, when in company, the superstitions of earlier times; though it is not unlikely that the nerves of some of the boldest contemners of marvellous manifestations, once universally accepted as true, might still tremble, if alone and under circumstances calculated to awaken apprehension and to puzzle the understanding. Notwithstanding the accepted theory, that the very pretence of witchcraft, for example, was exploded a hundred and fifty years ago, and the idea of an apparition, in spite of Dr. Johnson's belief, and that of others as wise and stout as he, would be scouted as preposterous in cultivated circles, I believe that there are many places in New England where undoubting faith in both superstitions still prevails, and I know that within a third part of the period above mentioned, very many creditable persons in a certain place in New England accepted the strangest occurrences of both kinds, upon the supposed evidence of their sober senses.