Page:O Genteel Lady! (1926).pdf/53

 her sleep. The voice of the witch, 'I am a gospel woman and God will save me. I am a gospel woman and I hurt no man.'

'Why do you torture these children?'

'I do not. I scorn it, and God shall prove me innocent as an unborn babe.'

The accused told of red and yellow birds, hairy imps, pretty black men dressed in green leaves, and these too Lanice could see by shutting her eyes.

In odd moments she saw Salem. Where the East Indiamen and China clippers had been were now a few lumber schooners from Nova Scotia, or a shipment of hides from the South. The proud city that Captain Poggy had, in his radiant boyhood, adored as a lover, had fallen into senility. He told Lanice, as they walked the dull, echoing streets, how he had first come to Salem as a youngster without worldly goods beyond his 'Bowditch, his Testament, his quadrant, and his mother's blessing,' and how he had risen to be master at twenty, at twenty-three had married his employer's daughter, and by thirty was a shipowner. The rest of his career Lanice gathered, from the speed with which he dismissed it, was nothing. The rise of the great firm of Poggy, Banks & Poggy and all that he had accomplished since he was thirty—that any one might have done. But to be master at twenty!

He told her how, when he had come into control of the great shipping interests of Salem's most distinguished family, he decided Boston was the coming port and that Salem had had her glorious day, so