s" or
"ologies" for girls in those days. She learned about her own country,
for already there were some histories written, and the causes that led
to the war. Some of the girls had grandmothers who had lived through
those exciting years, and made the relation of incidents much more
interesting than any dry written account that was mostly dates and
names. What heroes they had been! And the old _Mayflower_ story and John
Alden, and others who were to inspire a poet's pen.

Then there was the dread story of the witchcraft that had led Salem
astray. Cousin Chilian would never have it mentioned, and had taken away
several books he did not want her to see. But the girls had gone to some
of the old places, where witches had been taken from their homes and
cast into jail, the Court House where they had been tried, and Gallows
Hill, that most people shunned even now.

One rainy evening, after her lessons had been studied, Cynthia went
downstairs. Rachel had been fomenting her face for the toothache and was
lying down. Cousin Chilian had gone to a town-meeting, and the house
seemed so still that she almost believed she might see the ghost or
witch of the stories she had heard. No one was in the sitting-room, or
the kitchen proper, but she heard voices in what was called the summer
kitchen, a roughly constructed place with a stone chimney and a great
swinging crane. Here they did much of the autumn work, for Elizabeth was
quite a stickler for having a common place to save something nicer.

Mother Taft always smoked a pipe of tobacco in the evening. "It soothed
her," she said, after her tussle of fixing her patient for the night,
"and made her sleep better."

"And it's my opinion if Miss 'Lisbeth could just have a good smoke at
night 'twould do her more good than the doctor's powders."

"Why, Cynthy!" Cousin Eunice exclaimed.

"I was lonesome. Rachel's gone to sleep, Cousin Eunice--were there such
things as witches over a hundred years ago?"

Eunice glanced at Mother Taft. Witchcraft was a tabooed subject, yet it
lingered in more than one imaginative mind, though few would confess a
belief in it.

"Well, people may talk as they like, but there's many queer things in
the world. Now there's that falling sickness, as they call it. Jabez
Green has two children that roll on the floor, and froth at the mouth,
and their eyes bulge most out of their heads. They're lacking, we all
know. But when they come out of the fit they tell q