I've crossed the Psalter with Brady and Tate, And laid the Primer above them all, I've nailed a horseshoe over the grate, And hung a wig to my parlor wall Once worn by a learned Judge, they say, At Salem court in the witchcraft day! "_Conjuro te, sceleratissime_, _Abire ad tuum locum!_"--still Like a visible nightmare he sits by me,-- The exorcism has lost its skill; And I hear again in my haunted room The husky wheeze and the dolorous hum! Ah! commend me to Mary Magdalen With her sevenfold plagues, to the wandering Jew, To the terrors which haunted Orestes when The furies his midnight curtains drew, But charm him off, ye who charm him can, That reading demon, that fat old man! UNCLE BENTLEY AND THE ROOSTERS BY HAYDEN CARRUTH The burden of Uncle Bentley has always rested heavily on our town. Having not a shadow of business to attend to he has made other people's business his own, and looked after it in season and out--especially out. If there is a thing which nobody wants done, to this Uncle Bentley applies his busy hand. One warm summer Sunday we were all at church. Our pastor had taken the passage on turning the other cheek, or one akin to it, for his text, and was preaching on peace and quiet and non-resistance. He soon had us in a devout mood which must have been beautiful to see and encouraging to the good man. Of course, Uncle Bentley was there--he always was, and forever in a front pew, with his neck craned up looking backward to see if there was anything that didn't need doing which he could do. He always tinkered with the fires in the winter and fussed with the windows in the summer, and did his worst with each. His strongest church point was ushering. Not content to usher the stranger within our gates, he would usher all of us, and always thrust us into pews with just the people we didn't want to sit with. If you failed to follow him when he took you in tow, he would stop and look back reproachfully, describing mighty indrawing curves with his arm; and if you pretended not to see him, he would give a low whistle to attract your attention, the arm working right along, like a Holland windmill. On this particular warm summer Sunday Uncle Bentley was in place wearing his long, full-skirted coat, a queer, dark, bottle-green, purplish blue. He had ushered to his own exceeding joy, and got two men in one pew, and given them a single hymn-book, who wouldn't on week-days speak to each other. I ought to mention that we had long before made a verb of Uncle Bentley. To unclebentley was to do the wrong thing. It was a regular verb, unclebentley, unclebentleyed, unclebentleying. Those two rampant enemies in the same pew had been unclebentleyed.