t is, nevertheless, also true that
around it the simple superstitions of our ancestors still love to
linger; and there the half-sportful, half-serious charms of which I have
spoken are oftenest resorted to. It would be altogether out of place to
think of them by our black, unsightly stoves, or in the dull and dark
monotony of our furnace-heated rooms. Within the circle of the light of
the open fire safely might the young conjurers question destiny; for
none but kindly and gentle messengers from wonderland could venture
among them. And who of us, looking back to those long autumnal evenings
of childhood when the glow of the kitchen-fire rested on the beloved
faces of home, does not feel that there is truth and beauty in what the
quaint old author just quoted affirms? "As the spirits of darkness grow
stronger in the dark, so good spirits, which are angels of light, are
multiplied and strengthened, not only by the divine light of the sun and
stars, but also by the light of our common wood-fires." Even Lord
Bacon, in condemning the superstitious beliefs of his day, admits that
they might serve for winter talk around the fireside.

Fairy faith is, we may safely say, now dead everywhere,--buried,
indeed,--for the mad painter Blake saw the funeral of the last of the
little people, and an irreverent English bishop has sung their requiem.
It never had much hold upon the Yankee mind, our superstitions being
mostly of a sterner and less poetical kind. The Irish Presbyterians who
settled in New Hampshire about the year 1720 brought indeed with them,
among other strange matters, potatoes and fairies; but while the former
took root and flourished among us, the latter died out, after lingering
a few years in a very melancholy and disconsolate way, looking
regretfully back to their green turf dances, moonlight revels, and
cheerful nestling around the shealing fires of Ireland. The last that
has been heard of them was some forty or fifty years ago in a tavern
house in S-------, New Hampshire. The landlord was a spiteful little
man, whose sour, pinched look was a standing libel upon the state of his
larder. He made his house so uncomfortable by his moroseness that
travellers even at nightfall pushed by his door and drove to the next
town. Teamsters and drovers, who in those days were apt to be very
thirsty, learned, even before temperance societies were thought of, to
practice total abstinence on that road, and cracked their whi