f-way down the stairs, "Follow me!"

Trembling with terror, he passed down two flights of stairs, and found
himself treading on the cold brick floor of a large room in the basement,
or cellar, where he had never been before. The voice still beckoned him
onward; and, groping after it, his hand touched an upright post, against
which he leaned for a moment. He heard it again, apparently only two or
three yards in front of him "You have murdered a man; the officers are
close behind you; follow me!" Putting one foot forward while his hand
still grasped the post, it fell upon empty air, and he with difficulty
recovered himself. Stooping down and feeling with his hands, he found
himself on the very edge of a large uncovered cistern, or tank, filled
nearly to the top with water. The sudden shock of this discovery broke
the horrible enchantment. The whisperer was silent. He believed, at the
time, that he had been the subject, and well-nigh the victim, of a
diabolical delusion; and he states that, even now, with the recollection
of that strange whisper is always associated a thought of the universal
tempter.

Our worthy ancestors were, in their own view of the matter, the 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
gamekeeper of Der Freischutz 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 wizards," 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 greenness and the many-colored
wonder 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. An