n to be deserted. Yet, even as they looked,
a gate was lifted from its hinges and thrown through the air.

Walton ventured out, but a volley of stones, seemingly from a hundred
hands, was delivered at his head, and he ran back to shelter. Doors and
windows were barred and shuttered, but it made no difference. Stones, too
hot to hold a hand upon, were hurled through glass and down the chimney,
objects in the rooms themselves were picked up and flung at Walton,
candles were blown out, a hand without a body tapped at the window, locks
and bars and keys were bent as if by hammer-blows, a cheese-press was
smashed against the wall and the cheese spoiled, hay-stacks in the field
were broken up and the hay tossed into branches of trees. For a long time
Walton could not go out at night without being assailed with stones.
Bell, book, candle, and witch-broth availed nothing, and it was many a
day before peace came to the Walton household.

In 1802 an epidemic of assault went through the Berkshire Hills. The
performance began in a tailor's shop in Salisbury, Connecticut, at eleven
of the clock on the night of November 2, when a stick and lumps of stone,
charcoal, and mortar were flung through a window. The moon was up, but
nothing could be seen, and the bombardment was continued until after
daylight. After doing some damage here the assailants went to the house
of Ezekiel Landon and rapped away there for a week. Persons were struck
by the missiles, and quantities of glass were destroyed. Nothing could be
seen coming toward the windows until the glass broke, and it was seldom
that anything passed far into a room. No matter how hard it was thrown,
it dropped softly and surely on the sill, inside, as if a hand had put it
there. Windows were broken on both sides of buildings at the same time,
and many sticks and stones came through the same holes in the panes, as
if aimed carefully by a gunner.

A hamlet that stood in Sage's ravine, on the east side of the Dome of the
Taconics, was assailed in the same way after nightfall. One house was
considerably injured. No causes for the performance were ever discovered,
and nobody in the place was known to have an enemy--at least, a malicious
one.

At Whitmire Hill, Georgia, the spot where two murders were committed
before the war, is a headless phantom that comes thundering down on the
wayfarer on the back of a giant horse and vanishes at the moment when the
heart of his prospective victim is