Page:Salem - a tale of the seventeenth century (IA taleseventeenth00derbrich).pdf/110

 subject of thought and conversation; the news was industriously spread far and wide; and persons from all directions flocked together to witness and share in the unfamiliar and exciting scenes.

The strange nature of the whole proceedings—the monstrous and supernatural crime which was to be the object of inquiry and judgment—had roused the people to the wildest curiosity, and this curiosity was heightened and intensified by the universal terror.

There was a solemn romance, a fascination about this great and unfamiliar crime, which lesser and more common offenses, such as arson and petty larceny, could not boast; and then crime of all kinds was less common than now.

We, who live in an age when the public journals collect and daily serve up to us all the crimes of all the world (a very doubtful good, certainly!)—we, to whom murder and suicide seem almost the common road out of life—to whom fatal accidents and wholesale manslaughter are such constantly recurring trivialities that a whole page of