Page:O Genteel Lady! (1926).pdf/59

 Pleasant Treatises of Witches.' Glanville's 'Sadducismus Triumphatus,' and 'The Hammer for Witches.'

Nothing in the Salem trials had prepared her for the magic of the earlier European beliefs. So old was this religion, older than Christianity. There were lithesome devils who came to the worshippers dressed in green leaves and danced in magic circles, and beautiful naked witches, the black goat, and unbaptized children with no cross to guard them. She learned the body-marks the Devil put upon his worshippers, and, safe in the scholastic gloom of the Athenæum, safe in Boston far, far away from the morning of the world when such things originated, she learned of the earth-old fertility rites. She blushed and went cold. She hated the human race that had thought so evilly. She tried to forget and hurry on. She learned of strange night demons, incubi and succubæ, and the use a cat can be put to in brewing a storm, or a wax puppet in the slaying of man, and how the fertility of field or beast or human may be blasted.

The world had been clothed, and now was naked. She gritted her teeth against its ugliness and from a small part of what she had learned she wrote her chapter. There was in it none of the mawkishness of her 'Godey's Book' or 'House and Home' stories. The thought that no one would guess her to be the author gave her assurance and poise. She did not have to think whether or not it was appropriate and becoming to one of the gentler sex to write such things.