Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER IV. THE GATHERING OF THE STORM. "Men spake in whispers—each one feared to meet another's eye; As iron seemed the sterile earth, as brass the sullen sky. But patience had her perfect work, abundant faith was given; Oh! who shall say the scourge of earth doth not bear fruit for heaven?" S the occurrences at Salem village, of which mention has been made in a previous chapter, and of which Alice Campbell, on her return from Nurse's Farm, had brought the first tidings to her grandmother, were destined to assume an importance far more than commensurate with their apparently trivial beginning; and as "the little cloud scarcely bigger than a man's hand" was afterward to spread and deepen, until its baneful influence overwhelmed for a time the powers of truth, reason, and justice, and the whole land sat trembling in the horrorof great darkness, it becomes necessary to the course of our narrative that we should turn back and learn what the pages of history and the voices of tradition have preserved of the commencement of the strange and terrible delusion which, under the name of the " Salem Witchcraft," has made itself known and recognized over more than half the world. "Salem village, subsequently known as Danvers, where the first outbreak of this fearful scourge had its rise, was not in those early days a distinct and independent town: it was then the suburbs, the outgrowth, and the more rural portion of the town of Salem. It had been the sagacious policy of the infant colony, as soon as possible, to issue grants of large tracts of land to influential men, of independent means, enterprising spirit, and liberal views—such men as Winthrop, Dudley, Browne, Endicott, Bishop, Ingersoll, and others; men who had the power, as well as the will, to lay out roads, subdu...