Let us endeavor to carry ourselves back to the state of the colony of Massachusetts one hundred and seventy years ago. The persecutions our ancestors had undergone in their own country, and the privations, altogether inconceivable by us, they suffered during the early years of their residence here, acting upon their minds and characters, in co-operation with the influences of the political and ecclesiastical occurrences that marked the seventeenth century, had imparted a gloomy, solemn, and romantic turn to their dispositions and associations, which was transmitted without diminution to their children, strengthened and aggravated by their peculiar circumstances. It was the triumphant age of superstition. The imagination had been expanded by credulity, until it had reached a wild and monstrous growth. The Puritans were always prone to subject themselves to its influence; and New England, at the time to which we are referring, was a most fit and congenial theatre upon which to display its power. Cultivation had made but a slight encroachment on the wilderness. Wide, dark, unexplored forests covered the[i.7] hills, hung over the lonely roads, and frowned upon the scattered settlements. Persons whose lives have been passed where the surface has long been opened, and the land generally cleared, little know the power of a primitive wilderness upon the mind. There is nothing more impressive than its sombre shadows and gloomy recesses. The solitary wanderer is ever and anon startled by the strange, mysterious sounds that issue from its hidden depths. The distant fall of an ancient and decayed trunk, or the tread of animals as they prowl over the mouldering branches with which the ground is strown; the fluttering of unseen birds brushing through the foliage, or the moaning of the wind sweeping over the topmost boughs,—these all tend to excite the imagination and solemnize the mind. But the stillness of a forest is more startling and awe-inspiring than its sounds. Its silence is so deep as itself to become audible to the inner soul. It is not surprising that wooded countries have been the fruitful fountains and nurseries of superstition. "In such a place as this, at such an hour, If ancestry can be in aught believed, Descending spirits have conversed with man, And told the secrets of the world unknown." The forests which surrounded our ancestors were the abode of a mysterious race of men of strange demeanor and unascertained origin. The aspects they presented, the stories told of them, and every thing connected with them, served to awaken fear, bewilder the imagination, and aggravate the tendencies of the general condition of things to fanatical enthusiasm.[i.8] It was the common belief, sanctioned, as will appear in the course of this discussion, not by the clergy alone, but by the most learned scholars of that and the preceding ages, that the American Indians were the subjects and worshippers of the Devil, and their powwows, wizards.