The Knickerbocker, Vol. 22, No. 1, July 1843Various
General
The Knickerbocker, Vol. 22, No. 1, July 1843
Various
Periodicals
has seen the black man.' Another long pause ensued, during which
the impatience of the couple manifested itself by agitations,
and writhings of their heads and extremities. Faithful not
making his appearance, these spasmodic affections increased to
universal and horrible convulsions of their whole frames; and
they sat like two Pythonesses on their sacred stools, pregnant
with inspiration, and looking unutterable things. At length, in
the midst of her paroxysm, Deliverance bounced from her seat,
exclaiming with vehemence, 'I notion to send Remarkable to see
where the minister stays!'
REMARKABLE SHORT, a woman six feet in her stockings, and quite 'in
keeping' with the HOBBES family, is despatched after Faithful by
Deliverance, in these dulcet-words: 'Remarky, I wish you'd go down
to Goody Peabody's and look after the minister that ate supper
here. I notion that he's forgot that it's time for him to come back
and pray, before we go to bed.' Remarkable and her errand were
not very courteously received. Goody Peabody said 'she admired
what business such a long-shanked, ill-conditioned, bitter-looking
body as she, had to be snooping about other people's houses at
that time of night; that Faithful was going to keep company with
her daughter PATIENCE; that Remarkable had better return to her
employer; adding, that if she didn't troop in less than no time,
she would see if her help, PRESERVED PERKINS, couldn't help her.'
Remarkable, after a series of adventures, arrives at home, and
reports progress. Deliverance and her daughter Beautiful receive
the intelligence of the defection of the minister in a paroxysm of
anger and mortification; which ends in Beautiful's falling back in
violent contortions, exclaiming that she is 'bewitched by Patience
Peabody!' The village of Salem, it should be premised, was at
this period in a woful state of perturbation, if we may believe
COTTON MATHER, who tells us that 'the devils were walking about
the streets with lengthened chains, making a dreadful noise in our
ears; and brimstone, even without a metaphor, was making a horrid
and an horrible stench in our nostrils. And whoever,' he adds,
'questions any of these things, I hold to be a person of peculiar
dirtiness.' If we may believe MATHER, therefore, the 'Prince of the
Air' and his imps, with an innumerable host of spectres, phantoms,
apparitions, and hobgoblins, were let loose upon this devoted place,
and at the instigation of old women, potent in witchcraft, were
playing their damned pranks upon the inhabitants. Some delighted to
stick pins and forks in the tender flesh of innocent babes. Others
would grievously torment poor damsels, buffeting and tossing them
about in a most lamentable manner. Sometimes they would cause the
most serious and sober-minded persons to babble forth unutterable
nonsense in all the known languages of the earth, except the
Iroquois, in the which, it is said, the devil himself hath no
skill.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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