In conversing with a friend recently, who is a most decided unbeliever in the supernatural, he mentioned a fact of his own experience. Awaking one night from sleep, he saw distinctly, before him, looking through the thick wall of darkness, an eye, intensely bright-large, luminous, and with an expression of terrible malignity. He rose up in his bed, and, being a man of firm nerves, looked calmly at the singular apparition. It seemed slowly to approach him, until it rested just at the foot of his bed, where its demon glare gradually faded into the darkness. Had my friend lived two centuries ago, instead of regarding it as an optical illusion, he would have called in the priest to dislodge an evil spirit.

Old women in this region yet tell marvellous stories of Gen. M., of Hampton, N. H., of his league with the Devil, who used to visit him occasionally in the shape of a small man in a leathern dress. The General's house was once burned, in revenge, as it is said, by the Fiend, whom the other had outwitted. He had agreed, it seems, to furnish the General with a boot-full of gold and silver poured annually down the chimney. The shrewd Yankee cut off, on one occasion, the foot of the boot, and the Devil kept pouring down the coin from the chimney's top, in a vain attempt to fill it, until the room was literally packed with the precious metal. When the General died, he was laid out, and put in a coffin as usual, but on the day of the funeral, on opening the lid, his body was not to be seen, and the neighbors came to the charitable conclusion that the Enemy had got his own at last.

Haunted houses are getting scarce

in New England. Formerly every village could boast of one or more of these favored tenements. I have nevertheless, seen several of a most unchristian reputation in this respect,old, black, and unseemly, with shingles and clap-boards hanging loose, and ragged, like the cloak of Otway's witch. A new coat of paint, in almost all cases, proves an effectual exorcism. A former neighbor of mine,—a simple, honest mechanic,-used to amuse us by his reiterated complaints of the diabolical revels of certain evil spirits, which had chosen his garret for their ballroom. All night long he could hear a dance going on above him, regulated by some infernal melody. He had no doubt whatever of the supernatural character of the annoyance, and treated with contempt the suggestion of his neighbors, that, after all it might be nothing more than the rats among his

corn.

Whoever has seen Great Pond in the East parish of Haverhill, has seen one of the very loveliest of the thousand little lakes or ponds of New England. With its soft slopes of greenest verdure

its white and sparkling sand-rimits southern hem of pine and maple, mirrored, with spray and leaf, in the glassy water-its graceful hill-sentinels round about, white with the orchard-bloom of spring, or tasselled with the corn of autumn-its long sweep of blue waters, broken here and there by picturesque islands-it would seem a spot, of all others, where spirits of evil would shrink, rebuked and abashed, from the presence of the Beautiful. Yet here, too, has the shadow of the supernatural fallen. A lady of my acquaintance, a staid,

unimaginative church-member, states that a few years ago she was standing in the angle formed by two roads, one of which traverses the pond shore, the other leading over the hill which rises abruptly from the water. It was a warm summer evening, just at sunset. She was startled by the appearance of a horse and cart of the kind used a century ago in New England, driving rapidly down the steep hill-side, and crossing the wall a few yards before her, without noise, or the displacing of a stone. The driver sat sternly erect -with a fierce countenance; grasping the reins tightly, and looking neither to the right nor the left. Behind the cart, and apparently lashed to it, was a woman of gigantic size, her countenance convulsed with a blended expression of rage and agony, writhing and struggling, like Laocoon in the folds of the serpent. Her head, neck, feet and arms were naked; wild locks of grey hair streamed back from temples corrugated and darkened. The horrible cavalcade swept by across the street, and disappeared at the margin of the pond.

I have heard many similar stories, but the foregoing may serve as a sample of all. When we consider what the popular belief of New England was no longer than a century and a half ago, it is by no means surprising that something of the old superstition still lingers among us. Our puritan ancestors were, in their own view of the matter, a sort of advance guard and forlorn hope of Christendom, in its contest with the Bad Angel. The new world into which they had so valiantly pushed the outposts of the Church militant, was to them, not God's world, but the Devil's. They stood there on their little patch of sanctified territory, like the game-keeper of Der Frieschutz in the charmed circle, within were prayer, and fasting, unmelodious psalmody, and solemn hewing of heretics "before the Lord in Gilgal;" without were "dogs and sorcerers," red children of perdition, Powah wizzards and "the foul fiend." In their grand old wilderness, broken by fair broad rivers, and dotted with loveliest lakes, hanging with festoons of leaf and vine and flower, the steep sides of mountains, whose naked tops rose over the surrounding verdure like altars of a giant world with its early summer green

ness, and the many-colored verdure of its autumn, all glowing as if the rainbows of a summer shower had fallen upon it, under the clear, rich light of a sun, to which the misty day of their cold island was as moonlight,-they saw no beauty, they recognized no holy revelation. It was to them terrible as the forest which Dante traversed, on his way to the World of Pain. Every advance step they made was upon the Enemy's territory. And one has only to read the writings of the two Mathers, to perceive that that Enemy was to them no metaphysical abstraction, no scholastic definition, no figment of a poetical fancy, but a living, active Reality, alternating between the sublimest possibilities of evil, and the lowest tricks of mean mischief; now a "tricksey spirit," disturbing the good wife's platters or soiling her new-washed linen, and anon riding the storm-cloud, and pointing its thunder-bolts; for as the elder Mather pertinently inquires, "how else is it that our meeting-houses are burned by the lightning?" What was it, for instance, but his subtlety, which, speaking through the lips of Madam Hutchinson, confuted the "Judges of Israel," and put to their wit's end the godly ministers of the puritan Zion? Was not his evil finger manifested in the contumacious heresy of Roger Williams? Who else gave the Jesuit missionaries-locusts from the pit as they were-such a hold on the affections of those very savages who would not have scrupled to hang the scalp of pious father Wilson himself from their girdles? To the vigilant eye of Puritanism was he not alike discernible in the light wantonness of the May-pole revellers, beating time with clever foot to the vain music of obscene dances; and in the silent, hat-canopied gatherings of the Quakers, “the most melancholy of the sects," as Dr. More calls them? Perilous and glorious was it under these circumstances, for such men as Mather and Stoughton to gird up their stout loins, and do battle with the unmeasured, all-surrounding Terror. Let no man lightly estimate their spiritual knight-errantry. The heroes of old romance who went about smiting dragons, lopping giants' heads, and otherwise pleasantly diverting themselves, scarcely deserve mention in comparison with our New England champions, who, trusting not to carnal

fear of a Satan of the future-a sort of ban-dog of Priestcraft, held in its leash and ready to be let loose upon the disputers of its authority,-our toiling brothers of past ages have permitted their human task-masters to convert God's beautiful world, so adorned and fitted for the peace and happiness of all, into a great prison-house of suffering, filled with the actual terrors which the imagination of the old poets gave to the realm of Rhadamanthus. And hence, while I would not weaken in the slightest degree the influence of that doctrine of future retribution, the truth of which, reason, revelation and conscience unite in attesting, as the necessary result of the preservation and continuance in another state of existence, of the soul's individuality and identity, I must, nevertheless, rejoice that the many are no longer willing to permit the few, for their especial benefit, to convert our Common Father's heritage into a present hell, where, in return for undeserved suffering and toil uncompensated, they can have gracious and comfortable assurance of release from a future one. Better is the fear of the Lord than the fear of the Devil. Holier and more acceptable the obedience of love and reverence than the crushing submission of slavish terror. The heart which has felt the "beauty of holi

ness," which has been in some measure attuned to the divine harmony, which now, as of old in the angel-hymn of the Advent, breathes of "glory to God, peace on earth and good will to men,' ," in the serene atmosphere of that "perfect love which casteth out fear," smiles at the terrors which throng the sick dreams of the sensual, which draw aside the night-curtains of guilt, and startle with whispers of revenge the oppressor of the poor.

There is a beautiful moral in one of Fouquè's Miniature Romances, "DIE KOHLERFAMILIE." The fierce spectre, which rose, giant-like, in its blood-red mantle, before the selfish and mercenary merchant, ever increasing in size and terror with the growth of evil and impure thought in the mind of the latter, subdued by prayer and penitence, and patient watchfulness over the heart's purity, became a loving and gentle visitation of soft light and meekest melody,-" a beautiful radiance at times hovering and flowing on before the traveller, illuminating the bushes and foliage of the mountain forest-a lustre strange and lovely, such as the soul may conceive, but no words express. He felt its power in the depths of his being-felt it like the mystic breathing of the spirit of God."

adept in the art of magic. To him resorted farmers who had lost their cattle, matrons whose household gear, silver spoons, and table linen had been stolen, or young maidens whose lovers were absent; and the quiet, meek-spirited old man received them all kindly, put on his huge iron-rimmed spectacles, opened his conjuring book," which my mother describes as a large clasped volume in strange language and black letter type, and after due reflection and consideration gave the required answers without money and without price. The curious old volume is still in the possession of the conjuror's family. Apparently inconsistent as was this practice of the Black Art with the simplicity and truthfulness of his religious.