Page:Salem - a tale of the seventeenth century (IA taleseventeenth00derbrich).pdf/76



CHAPTER V.

IDOL WORSHIP.

"As the Greegree holds his Fetish from the white man's gaze apart."

It was just at the close of a sultry and oppressive day, when the heavily lowering clouds, the deep, low muttering of the distant thunder, and the sharp, but infrequent flashes of lightning, told of the gathering tempest which was slowly rolling up the darkening heavens, that a man, issuing from the back door of the Rev. Mr. Parris's house, made his way silently and under cover of the deepening twilight through the straggling street of Salem village.

This man was "Indian John," as he was usually called, a domestic slave in the service of Mr. Parris, then minister of the little church gathered at the village.

We have said that the man was a slave,