Beneath a round bit of glass was a
death's head. Engraved on one side of this, "L.B. AEt. 22,"--on the
other, "Ob. 1692."
My grandmother's grandmother,--said the little man.--Hanged for a
witch. It doesn't seem a great while ago. I knew my grandmother, and
loved her. Her mother was daughter to the witch that Chief Justice
Sewall hanged and Cotton Mather delivered over to the Devil.--That was
Salem, though, and not Boston. No, not Boston. Robert Calef, the Boston
merchant, it was that blew them all to----
Never mind where he blew them to,--I said;--for the little man was
getting red in the face, and I didn't know what might come next.
This episode broke me up, as the jockeys say, out of my square
conversational trot; but I settled down to it again.
----A man that knows men, in the street, at their work, human nature in
its shirt-sleeves,--who makes bargains with deacons, instead of talking
over texts with them,--a man who has found out that there are plenty of
praying rogues and swearing saints in the world,--above all, who has
found out, by living into the pith and core of life, that all of thy
Deity which can be folded up between the sheets of any human book is to
the Deity of the firmament, of the strata, of the hot aortic flood of
throbbing human life, of this infinite, instantaneous consciousness in
which the soul's being consists,--an incandescent point in the filament
connecting the negative pole of a past eternity with the positive pole
of an eternity that is to come,--that all of the Deity which any human
book can hold is to this larger Deity of the working battery of the
universe only as the films in a book of gold-leaf are to the broad
seams and curdled lumps of ore that lie in unsunned mines and virgin
placers,----Oh!--I was saying that a man who lives out-of-doors, among
live people, gets some things into his head he might not find in the
index of his "Body of Divinity.
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