Behind their victims came the afflicted, a guilty and miserableband; villains who had thus avenged themselves on their enemies, andviler wretches, whose cowardice had destroyed their friends;lunatics, whose ravings had chimed in with the madness of the land;and children, who had played a game that the imps of darkness mighthave envied them, since it disgraced an age, and dipped a people'shands in blood. In the rear of the procession rode a figure onhorseback, so darkly conspicuous, so sternly triumphant, that myhearers mistook him for the visible presence of the fiend himself;but it was only his good friend, Cotton Mather, proud of his well-wondignity, as the representative of all the hateful features of histime; the one blood-thirsty man, in whom were concentrated thosevices of spirit and errors of opinion that sufficed to madden thewhole surrounding multitude. And thus I marshalled them onward, theinnocent who were to die, and the guilty who were to grow old in longremorse- tracing their every step, by rock, and shrub, and brokentrack, till their shadowy visages had circled round the hill-top,where we stood. I plunged into my imagination for a blacker horror,and a deeper woe, and pictured the scaffold-But here my companions seized an arm on each side; their nerveswere trembling; and, sweeter victory still, I had reached the seldomtrodden places of their hearts, and found the well-spring of theirtears. And now the past had done all it could. We slowly descended,watching the lights as they twinkled gradually through the town, andlistening to the distant mirth of boys at play, and to the voice ofa young girl warbling somewhere in the dusk, a pleasant sound towanderers from old witch times. Yet, ere we left the hill, we couldnot but regret that there is nothing on its barren summit, no relicof old, nor lettered stone of later days, to assist the imaginationin appealing to the heart. We build the memorial column on the heightwhich our fathers made sacred with their blood, poured out in a holycause. And here, in dark, funereal stone, should rise anothermonument, sadly commemorative of the errors of an earlier race, andnot to be cast down, while the human heart has one infirmity thatmay result in crime.
THE END
.
1844
TWICE-TOLD TALES
EARTH'S HOLOCAUST
by Nathaniel Hawthorne
ONCE UPON A TIME- but whether in the time past or time to come,is a matter of little or no moment- this wide world had become sooverburthened with an accumulation of worn-out trumpery, that theinhabitants determined to rid themselves of it by a general bonfire.
The site fixed upon, at the representation of the insurance companies,and as being as central a spot as any other on the globe, was one ofthe broadest prairies of the West, where no human habitation wouldbe endangered by the flames, and where a vast assemblage of spectatorsmight commodiously admire the show. Having a taste for sights ofthis kind, and imagining, likewise, that the illumination of thebonfire might reveal some profundity or moral truth, heretofore hiddenin mist or darkness, I made it convenient to journey thither and bepresent. At my arrival, although the heap of condemned rubbish wasas yet comparatively small, the torch had already been applied. Amidthat boundless plain, in the dusk of the evening, like a far-offstar alone in the firmament, there was merely visible one tremulousgleam, whence none could have anticipated so fierce a blaze as wasdestined to ensue. With every moment, however, there camefoot-travellers, women holding up their aprons, men on horseback,wheelbarrows, lumbering baggage wagons, and other vehicles, greatand small, and from far and near, laden with articles that were judgedfit for nothing but to be burnt.
"What materials have been used to kindle the flame?" inquired Iof a bystander, for I was desirous of knowing the whole process of theaffair from beginning to end.
The person whom I addressed was a grave man, fifty years old, orthereabout, who had evidently come thither as a looker-on; he struckme immediately as having weighed for himself the true value of lifeand its circumstances, and therefore as feeling little personalinterest in whatever judgment the world might form of them. Beforeanswering my question, he looked me in the face, by the kindling lightof the fire.
"Oh, some very dry combustibles," replied he, "and extremelysuitable to the purpose- no other, in fact, than yesterday'snewspapers, last month's magazines, and last year's withered leaves.
