So the race drifts, scuds, tacks, works, or runs towards the great harbor. So was it in the seventeenth century. Old people, as now, took to tea, dozy armchairs, tedious gossip, and mumbling recollections of the golden days of youth,—golden even if actually passed amid steel points, arrow-heads, or among the rude ploughshares of ever-recurring, never-ending toil. Grief and gladness pendulated with regular swings and carried the hour-hands of family life evenly and surely on through the uneventful spaces, until at last the solemn bell struck. Then a new mound was sodded under the willow-trees in the rude churchyard, whose slate-stones notched the advance of the Colonies. Among the young people love crept in, too, under shaggy vests and calico bodices. Soft words passed into earnest vows, and clergymen or country squires welded the glowing pieces into instruments of uncomplaining labor and life-long use. Then came new voices into the house, and,—well, at the winding-up of the century there were two hundred and thirty-five thousand people in the settlements. There would have been more, but—Chicago had not yet started. And now, tying our coltish Colonies to the bars of the eighteenth century, we leave them for a short time while we run down a few stray subjects, skittishly grazing in the back pastures. We shall soon return to drive them all into the ranker grass of the opening plantations. CHAPTER IX. WITCHCRAFT. The Witch-Caldron at Salem.—How its Bubbling raised Teapot Lids and has kept open other Lids ever since.—The Young Female Witches at Salem condemned to the Ties of Matrimony; the Old Ones to harder Knots.—The Sin of being Old considered.—The Scarlet Letter.—Examples of Witchcraft cited.—The Delusion of Adam and Eve at the first Pomological Convention in Eden.—Woman as Man’s Familiar Spirit; and her Conjuries.—Cases of David, Samson, and Herod.—Antony dissolved in that Egyptian Drink, Pearl Water.—The Maid of Orleans and what an Arc she subtended.—The Philters of Love, Ambition, Heroism, etc., administered to Men and Nations.—Their Effects.—Delusions, like Measles, catching.—The Frenzies of Fashion fully described.—The Stock Exchange.—Private Witchcrafts at Quiltings, Apple-Parings, etc.—Red Corn and other Red Ears.—Sweet Witches.—A Jury of Gushing Girls.—Punishment of Men incapable of being bewitched. Just as the last sands were dropping at once out of the hour-glasses of the seventeenth century and of a few old women at Salem, a strange trouble bubbled up in that little teapot of a place, which not only raised its lid at the time, but has kept a great many wide-open eyes fixed on it ever since, to see how it happened, and whether it would not, perhaps, do it again. Do it again! of course not; and very sorry that it ever did it at all. Let us distill from it first-proof historical stimulation, while we wait for the colts to cool off.