A Study of Hawthorne | Page 7

hill there is no special
suggestion of the dark memory that broods upon it when seen in history.
An obliging Irish population has relieved the descendants of both the
witches and their exterminators from an awkward task, by covering
with their own barren little dwellings the three sides of the height
facing the town. Still, they have not ventured beyond a certain line.

One small area at the summit is wholly unencroached upon. Whether or
not through fear of some evil influence resting upon the spot, no house
as yet disturbs this space, though the thin turf has been somewhat
picked away by desultory sod-diggers. There is nothing save this
squalid, lonely desolation to commemorate the fact that such unhappy
and needless deaths were here endured. It is enough. Mere human
sympathy takes us back with awful vividness to that time when the
poor victims looked their last from this, upon the bleak boundary-hills
of the inland horizon and that hopeless semicircle of the sea on the
other side. A terrible and fitting place for execution, indeed! It looms
up visible for many miles of lower country around; and as you stand
upon the top, earth seems to fall away with such a fatal ease around it!
The stranger is naturally drawn hence to the Court House, where, by
calling a clerk from his routine in a room fairly lined and stuccoed with
bundles of legal papers, he may get a glimpse of the famous
"witch-pins." These are the identical little instruments which the
afflicted children drew from different parts of their dress, in the
trial-room, declaring that some one of the accused had just caused them
to be sharply inserted into their persons. The pins are kept in a small
glass bottle, and are thin and rudely made; and as one looks at the
curious, homely little relics, it is hard to know whether to laugh at the
absurdly insignificant sight, or shudder at the thought of what deadly
harm they worked in the hands of the bewitched. So, while one is
hesitating, one gives the bottle back to the clerk, who locks it up
speedily, and at the next instant is absorbed in the drawing up of some
document; leaving the intruder free to pursue his search for antiquities
elsewhere. But the monuments and remains of the past are nowhere
large enough, in our American towns, to furnish the pilgrim a complete
shelter and make an atmosphere of their own. The old Curwin Mansion,
or "Witch House," to be sure, with its jutting upper story, and its dark
and grimy room where witch-trials are rumored to have been held, is a
solid scrap of antique gloom; but an ephemeral druggist's shop has been
fastened on to a corner of the old building, and clings there like a
wasp's nest,--as subversive, too, of quiet contemplation. The
descendants of the first settlers have with pious care preserved the
remains of the First Church of Salem, and the plain little temple may

still be seen, though hidden away in the rear of the solid, brick-built
Essex Institute. Yet, after all, it is only the skeleton of the thing, the
original framework set into a modern covering for protection,--the
whole church being about as large as a small drawing-room only. Into
this little space a few dumb and shrinking witnesses of the past have
been huddled: the old communion-table, two ancient harpsichords, a
single pew-door, a wooden samp-mortar, and a huge, half-ruinous loom;
and some engraved portraits of ancient ministers hang upon the walls.
When I visited the place, a party of young men and women were there,
who hopelessly scattered any slight dust of revery that might have
settled on me from the ancient beams, and sent the ghosts fleeing
before their light laughter. The young women fingered the old
harpsichords, and incontinently thrummed upon them; and one cried,
"Play a waltz!" She was a pretty creature; and, as her gay tone mingled
with the rattle of protesting strings in the worn-out instrument, one
might easily have divined how dire a fate would have been hers, in the
days when men not only believed in bewitchment, but made it
punishable. Then a young man who had clung for guidance amid her
spells to the little printed pamphlet that describes the church, read aloud
from its pages, seriously: "'Nowhere else in this land may one find so
ancient and worshipful a shrine. Within these walls, silent with the
remembered presence of Endicott, Skelton, Higginson, Roger Williams,
and their grave compeers, the very day seems haunted, and the sunshine
falls but soberly in.'"
"O don't!" besought the siren, again. "We're not in a solemn state."
And, whether it was the spell of her voice or not, I confess the sunshine
did not seem to me