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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?"

As 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 horror