"Up the airy mountain,
Down the rushy glen,
We dare n't go a-hunting
For fear of little men.
Wee folk, good folk,
Trooping all together;
Green jacket, red cap,
Gray cock's feather."
ALLINGHAM.
IT was from a profound knowledge of human nature that Lord Bacon, in
discoursing upon truth, remarked that a mixture of a lie doth ever add
pleasure. "Doth any man doubt," he asks, "that if there were taken out
of men's minds vain opinions, flattering hopes, false valuations, and
imaginations, but it would leave the minds of a number of men poor,
shrunken things, full of melancholy and indisposition, and unpleasing to
themselves?" This admitted tendency of our nature, this love of the
pleasing intoxication of unveracity, exaggeration, and imagination, may
perhaps account for the high relish which children and nations yet in
the childhood of civilization find in fabulous legends and tales of
wonder. The Arab at the present day listens with eager interest to the
same tales of genii and afrits, sorcerers and enchanted princesses,
which delighted his ancestors in the times of Haroun al Raschid. The
gentle, church-going Icelander of our time beguiles the long night of
his winter with the very sagas and runes which thrilled with not
unpleasing horror the hearts of the old Norse sea-robbers. What child,
although Anglo-Saxon born, escapes a temporary sojourn in fairy-land?
Who of us does not remember the intense satisfaction of throwing aside
primer and spelling-book for stolen ethnographical studies of dwarfs,
and giants? Even in our own country and time old superstitions and
credulities still cling to life with feline tenacity. Here and there,
oftenest in our fixed, valley-sheltered, inland villages,--slumberous
Rip Van Winkles, unprogressive and seldom visited,--may be found the
same old beliefs in omens, warnings, witchcraft, and supernatural charms
which our ancestors brought with them two centuries ago from Europe.
The practice of charms, or what is popularly called "trying projects,"
is still, to some extent, continued in New England. The inimitable
description which Burns gives of similar practices in his Halloween may
not in all respects apply to these domestic conjurations; but the
following needs only the substitution of apple-seeds for nuts:--
"The auld gude wife's wheel-hoordet nits
Are round an' round divided;
An' mony lads and lassies' fates
Are there that night decided.
Some kindle couthie side by side
An' burn thegither trimly;
Some start awa wi' saucy pride
And jump out owre the chimlie."
One of the most common of these "projects" is as follows: A young woman
goes down into the cellar, or into a dark room, with a mirror in her
hand, and looking in it, sees the face of her future husband peering at
her through the darkness,--the mirror being, for the time, as potent as
the famous Cambuscan glass of which Chaucer discourses. A neighbor of
mine, in speaking of this conjuration, adduces a case in point. One of
her schoolmates made the experiment and saw the face of a strange man in
the glass; and many years afterwards she saw the very man pass her
father's door. He proved to be an English emigrant just landed, and in
due time became her husband. Burns alludes to something like the spell
above described:--
"Wee Jenny to her grannie says,
'will ye go wi' me, grannie,
To eat an apple at the glass
I got from Uncle Johnnie?'
She fuff't her pipe wi' sic a lunt,
In wrath she was so vaporin',
She noticed na an' azle brunt
Her bran new worset apron.
"Ye little skelpan-limmer's face,
How dare ye try sic sportin',
An' seek the foul thief ony place
For him to try your fortune?
Nae doubt but ye may get a sight;
Great cause ye hae to fear it;
For mony a one has gotten a fright,
An' lived and died delecrit."
It is not to be denied, and for truth's sake not to be regretted, that
this amusing juvenile glammary has seen its best days in New England.
The schoolmaster has been abroad to some purpose. Not without results
have our lyceum lecturers and travels of Peter Parley brought everything
in heaven above and in the earth below to the level of childhood's
capacities. In our cities and large towns children nowadays pass
through the opening acts of life's marvellous drama with as little
manifestation of wonder and surprise as the Indian does through the
streets of a civilized city which he has entered for the first time.
Yet Nature, sooner or later, vindicates her mysteries; voices from the
unseen penetrate the din of civilization. The child philosopher and
materialist often becomes the visionary of riper years, running into
illuminism, magnetism, and transcendentalism, with its inspired priests
and priestesses, its revelations and oracular responses.
But in many a green valley of rural New England there are children yet;
boys and girls are still to be found not quite overtaken by the march of
mind. There, too, are huskings, and apple-bees, and quilting parties,
and huge old-fashioned fireplaces piled with crackling walnut, flinging
its rosy light over happy countenances of youth and scarcely less happy
age. If it be true that, according to Cornelius Agrippa, "a wood fire
doth drive away dark spirits," it is, nevertheless, also true that
around it the simple superstitions of our ancestors still love to
linger; and there the half-sportful, half-serious charms of which I have
spoken are oftenest resorted to. It would be altogether out of place to
think of them by our black, unsightly stoves, or in the dull and dark
monotony of our furnace-heated rooms. Within the circle of the light of
the open fire safely might the young conjurers question destiny; for
none but kindly and gentle messengers from wonderland could venture
among them. And who of us, looking back to those long autumnal evenings
of childhood when the glow of the kitchen-fire rested on the beloved
faces of home, does not feel that there is truth and beauty in what the
quaint old author just quoted affirms? "As the spirits of darkness grow
stronger in the dark, so good spirits, which are angels of light, are
multiplied and strengthened, not only by the divine light of the sun and
stars, but also by the light of our common wood-fires." Even Lord
Bacon, in condemning the superstitious beliefs of his day, admits that
they might serve for winter talk around the fireside.
Fairy faith is, we may safely say, now dead everywhere,--buried,
indeed,--for the mad painter Blake saw the funeral of the last of the
little people, and an irreverent English bishop has sung their requiem.
It never had much hold upon the Yankee mind, our superstitions being
mostly of a sterner and less poetical kind. The Irish Presbyterians who
settled in New Hampshire about the year 1720 brought indeed with them,
among other strange matters, potatoes and fairies; but while the former
took root and flourished among us, the latter died out, after lingering
a few years in a very melancholy and disconsolate way, looking
regretfully back to their green turf dances, moonlight revels, and
cheerful nestling around the shealing fires of Ireland. The last that
has been heard of them was some forty or fifty years ago in a tavern
house in S-------, New Hampshire. The landlord was a spiteful little
man, whose sour, pinched look was a standing libel upon the state of his
larder. He made his house so uncomfortable by his moroseness that
travellers even at nightfall pushed by his door and drove to the next
town. Teamsters and drovers, who in those days were apt to be very
thirsty, learned, even before temperance societies were thought of, to
practice total abstinence on that road, and cracked their whips and
goaded on their teams in full view of a most tempting array of bottles
and glasses, from behind which the surly little landlord glared out upon
them with a look which seemed expressive of all sorts of evil wishes,
broken legs, overturned carriages, spavined horses, sprained oxen,
unsavory poultry, damaged butter, and bad markets. And if, as a matter
of necessity, to "keep the cold out of his stomach," occasionally a
wayfarer stopped his team and ventured to call for "somethin' warmin',"
the testy publican stirred up the beverage in such a spiteful way, that,
on receiving it foaming from his hand, the poor customer was half afraid
to open his mouth, lest the red-hot flip iron should be plunged down his
gullet.
As a matter of course, poverty came upon the house and its tenants like
an armed man. Loose clapboards rattled in the wind; rags fluttered from
the broken windows; within doors were tattered children and scanty fare.
The landlord's wife was a stout, buxom woman, of Irish lineage, and,
what with scolding her husband and liberally patronizing his bar in his
absence, managed to keep, as she said, her "own heart whole," although
the same could scarcely be said of her children's trousers and her own
frock of homespun. She confidently predicted that "a betther day was
coming," being, in fact, the only thing hopeful about the premises. And
it did come, sure enough. Not only all the regular travellers on the
road made a point of stopping at the tavern, but guests from all the
adjacent towns filled its long-deserted rooms,--the secret of which was,
that it had somehow got abroad that a company of fairies had taken up
their abode in the hostelry and daily held conversation with each other
in the capacious parlor. I have heard those who at the time visited the
tavern say that it was literally thronged for several weeks. Small,
squeaking voices spoke in a sort of Yankee-Irish dialect, in the haunted
room, to the astonishment and admiration of hundreds. The inn, of
course, was blessed by this fairy visitation; the clapboards ceased
their racket, clear panes took the place of rags in the sashes, and the
little till under the bar grew daily heavy with coin. The magical
influence extended even farther; for it was observable that the landlord
wore a good-natured face, and that the landlady's visits to the gin-
bottle were less and less frequent. But the thing could not, in the
nature of the case, continue long. It was too late in the day and on
the wrong side of the water. As the novelty wore off, people began to
doubt and reason about it. Had the place been traversed by a ghost or
disturbed by a witch they could have acquiesced in it very quietly; but
this outlandish belief in fairies was altogether an overtask for Yankee
credulity. As might have been expected, the little strangers, unable to
breathe in an atmosphere of doubt and suspicion, soon took their leave,
shaking off the dust of their elfin feet as a testimony against an
unbelieving generation. It was, indeed, said that certain rude fellows
from the Bay State pulled away a board from the ceiling and disclosed to
view the fairies in the shape of the landlady's three slatternly
daughters. But the reader who has any degree of that charity which
thinks no evil will rather credit the statement of the fairies
themselves, as reported by the mistress of the house, "that they were
tired of the new country, and had no pace of their lives among the
Yankees, and were going back to Ould Ireland."
It is a curious fact that the Indians had some notion of a race of
beings corresponding in many respects to the English fairies.
Schoolcraft describes them as small creatures in human shape, inhabiting
rocks, crags, and romantic dells, and delighting especially in points of
land jutting into lakes and rivers and which were covered with
pinetrees. They were called Puckweedjinees,--little vanishers.
In a poetical point of view it is to be regretted that our ancestors did
not think it worth their while to hand down to us more of the simple and
beautiful traditions and beliefs of the "heathen round about" them.
Some hints of them we glean from the writings of the missionary Mayhew
and the curious little book of Roger Williams. Especially would one
like to know more of that domestic demon, Wetuomanit, who presided over
household affairs, assisted the young squaw in her first essay at
wigwam-keeping, gave timely note of danger, and kept evil spirits at a
distance,--a kind of new-world brownie, gentle and useful.
Very suggestive, too, is the story of Pumoolah,--a mighty spirit, whose
home is on the great Katahdin Mountain, sitting there with his earthly
bride (a beautiful daughter of the Penobscots transformed into an
immortal by her love), in serenest sunshine, above the storm which
crouches and growls at his feet. None but the perfectly pure and good
can reach his abode. Many have from time to time attempted it in vain;
some, after almost reaching the summit, have been driven back by
thunderbolts or sleety whirlwinds.
Not far from my place of residence are the ruins of a mill, in a narrow
ravine fringed with trees. Some forty years ago the mill was supposed
to be haunted; and horse-shoes, in consequence, were nailed over its
doors. One worthy man, whose business lay beyond the mill, was afraid
to pass it alone; and his wife, who was less fearful of supernatural
annoyance, used to accompany him. The little old white-coated miller,
who there ground corn and wheat for his neighbors, whenever he made a
particularly early visit to his mill, used to hear it in full
operation,--the water-wheel dashing bravely, and the old rickety
building clattering to the jar of the stones. Yet the moment his hand
touched the latch or his foot the threshold all was hushed save the
melancholy drip of water from the dam or the low gurgle of the small
stream eddying amidst willow roots and mossy stones in the ravine below.
This haunted mill has always reminded me of that most beautiful of
Scottish ballads, the Song of the Elfin Miller, in which fairies are
represented as grinding the poor man's grist without toil:--
"Full merrily rings the mill-stone round;
Full merrily rings the wheel;
Full merrily gushes out the grist;
Come, taste my fragrant meal.
The miller he's a warldly man,
And maun hae double fee;
So draw the sluice in the churl's dam
And let the stream gae free!"
Brainerd, who truly deserves the name of an American poet, has left
behind him a ballad on the Indian legend of the black fox which haunted
Salmon River, a tributary of the Connecticut. Its wild and picturesque
beauty causes us to regret that more of the still lingering traditions
of the red men have not been made the themes of his verse:--