ions and hauntings, and devilish
terrors, were supposed to be peculiarly rife. Salem was, as it were,
snowed up, and left to prey upon itself. The long, dark evenings, the
dimly-lighted rooms, the creaking passages, where heterogeneous
articles were piled away out of reach of the keen-piercing frost, and
where occasionally, in the dead of night, a sound was heard, as of some
heavy falling body, when, next morning, everything appeared to be in
its right place--so accustomed are we to measure noises by comparison
with themselves, and not with the absolute stillness of the
night-season--the white mist, coming nearer and nearer to the windows
every evening in strange shapes, like phantoms,--all these, and many
other circumstances, such as the distant fall of mighty trees in the
mysterious forests girdling them round, the faint whoop and cry of some
Indian seeking his camp, and unwittingly nearer to the white men's
settlement than either he or they would have liked could they have
chosen, the hungry yells of the wild beasts approaching the
cattle-pens,--these were the things which made that winter life in
Salem, in the memorable time of 1691-2, seem strange, and haunted, and
terrific to many: peculiarly weird and awful to the English girl in her
first year's sojourn in America.

And now imagine Lois worked upon perpetually by Manasseh's conviction
that it was decreed that she should be his wife, and you will see that
she was not without courage and spirit to resist as she did, steadily,
firmly, and yet sweetly. Take one instance out of many, when her nerves
were subjected to a shock, slight in relation it is true, but then
remember that she had been all day, and for many days, shut up within
doors, in a dull light, that at mid-day was almost dark with a
long-continued snow-storm. Evening was coming on, and the wood fire was
more cheerful than any of the human beings surrounding it; the
monotonous whirr of the smaller spinning-wheels had been going on all
day, and the store of flax down stairs was nearly exhausted, when Grace
Hickson bade Lois fetch down some more from the store-room, before the
light so entirely waned away that it could not be found without a
candle, and a candle it would be dangerous to carry into that apartment
full of combustible materials, especially at this time of hard frost,
when every drop of water was locked up and bound in icy hardness. So
Lois went, half-shrinking from the long passage that led to