But the public and published examples of witchcraft are few compared with countless cases always going on in every community, urban or rural, unrecognized by any tribunals judicial or historic. At every apple-paring in New England,—in the husking-parties throughout the West, where the finding of the red ear of corn suddenly makes every kissful girl the personal owner of two redder ears,—in the quilting frolics at the South, where the young gentlemen of the place come in, after the sewing is done, and sow roses on cheeks white before,—by story-telling brooks that keep sacred the secrets of lovers, while babbling their own,—along the roadside, in quiet nooks, in village parlors, in crowded cities where mammon tries in vain to cheat the sweet witches out of their devotees,—everywhere, in fine, where hearts are not utterly trade-mailed, office-clad, or ossified, the tender delirium which early entered our great, glorious mad-house of a world, produces effects which are never understood by some, which confound the wise unwisdom of old judicial heads, and sometimes get inwrought into fine tragedies, before which even those of New England, although told by a good fellow or transfigured by a Longfellow, pale away faded and colorless. The man who is incapable of being bewitched by somebody or something, may make a good bargain, and live on unlovingly a long time,—like an air-plant, never touching his mother earth, or feeling its inspiriting magics; but he will never get much out of life except meat, drink, and cold-sheeted sleeps, nor add much to the happiness or greatness of his kind. He who lives in the United States beyond a fair age, without getting inextricably tangled in the witching meshes of some good mate, should be tried by a jury of gushing girls, and condemned for life to the pillow-ry with some of the modern witches of New England or the sorceresses of the South. Whosoever, then, accuses the witchcrafts of other times and ages, let him, ere he casts the first stone, look into his own heart, or around among his own household or community, and, borrowing a charity from his thoughts, say, if he can, “Go in—pieces.” [Illustration: COTTON MATHER EXORCISING A WITCH. (p. 176) ] CHAPTER X. OF THE MANNERS, MORALS, HABITS, AND LAWS OF THE COLONISTS IN THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY.