"When and where have you had experience of the black art?" "This morning, and in your house, sir." "You seem none the worse for it," said his host, smiling. "Indeed, I have not felt so well in months. Your larder will suffer if I am practiced upon any more." "Well, of all modern and prosaic results of witchery this exceeds," said Annie, laughing, "since only a good appetite comes of it." "It yet remains to be seen whether this is the only result," replied Gregory. "What possessed the old Puritans to persecute the Salem witches is a mystery to me, if their experience was anything like mine." "You must remember that the question of what was agreeable or otherwise scarcely entered into a Puritan's motives." "I am not so sure of that," he answered, quickly. "It has ever seemed to me that the good people of other days went into persecution with a zeal that abstract right can hardly account for. People will have their excitements, and a good rousing persecution used to stir things like the burning of Chicago or a Presidential election in our day." "Granting," said Annie, "the bigotry and cruelty of the persecutor--and these must be mainly charged to the age--still you must admit that among them were earnest men who did from good motives what appears very wrong to us. What seemed to them evil and destructive principles were embodied in men and women, and they meant to destroy the evil through the suffering and death of these poor creatures." "And then consider the simplicity and ease of the persecutor's method," continued Gregory, mockingly. "A man's head has become full of supposed doctrinal errors. To refute and banish these would require much study and argument on the part of the opponent. It was so much easier to take an obstinate heretic's head off than to argue with him! I think it was the simplicity of the persecutor's method that kept it in favor so long." "But it never convinced any one," said Annie, "and the man killed merely goes into another world of the same opinion still." "And there probably learns, poor fellow, that both were wrong, and that he had better have been content with good dinners and a quiet life, and let theology alone." "The world would move but slowly, if all men were content with 'good dinners and a quiet life,'" said Annie, satirically. "But you have not answered my question. Could not good, earnest men have been very cruel, believing that everything depended on their uprooting some evil of their day?"