enough seriousness in De Foe's romance,
just enough piety to appeal for sympathy to one of Captivity Waite's
religious turn of mind. When it came to fiction involving witches,
ogres, and flubdubs, that was too much for Captivity, and the spirit of
the little Puritan revolted.

Yet I have the documentary evidence to prove that Captivity's ancestors
(both paternal and maternal) were, in the palmy colonial times, as
abject slaves to superstition as could well be imagined. The Waites of
Salem were famous persecutors of witches, and Sinai Higginbotham
(Captivity's great-great-grandfather on her mother's side of the
family) was Cotton Mather's boon companion, and rode around the gallows
with that zealous theologian on that memorable occasion when five young
women were hanged at Danvers upon the charge of having tormented little
children with their damnable arts of witchcraft. Human thought is like
a monstrous pendulum: it keeps swinging from one extreme to the other.
Within the compass of five generations we find the Puritan first an
uncompromising believer in demonology and magic, and then a scoffer at
everything involving the play of fancy.

I felt harshly toward Captivity Waite for a time, but I harbor her no
ill-will now; on the contrary, I recall with very tender feelings the
distant time when our sympathies were the same and when we journeyed
the pathway of early youth in a companionship sanctified by the
innocence and the loyalty and the truth of childhood. Indeed, I am not
sure that that early friendship did not make a lasting impression upon
my life; I have thought of Captivity Waite a great many times, and I
have not unfrequently wondered what might have been but for that book
of fairy tales which my Uncle Cephas sent me.

She was a very pretty child, and she lost none of her comeliness and
none of her sweetness of character as she approached maturity. I was
impressed with this upon my return from college. She, too, had pursued
those studies deemed necessary to the acquirement of a good education;
she had taken a four years' course at South Holyoke and had finished at
Mrs. Willard's seminary at Troy. "You will now," said her father, and
he voiced the New England sentiment regarding young womanhood; "you
will now return to the quiet of your home and under the direction of
your mother study the performance of those weightier duties which
qualify your sex for a realization of the solemn responsibilities of
hu