vil
omens. Whenever his tribe passed the falls they halted and with brief
ceremonials commemorated the death of Occuna.

FRANCIS WOOLCOTT'S NIGHT-RIDERS

In Copake, New York, among the Berkshire Hills, less than a century ago,
lived Francis Woolcott, a dark, tall man, with protruding teeth, whose
sinister laugh used to give his neighbors a creep along their spines. He
had no obvious trade or calling, but the farmers feared him so that he
had no trouble in making levies: pork, flour, meal, cider, he could have
what he chose for the asking, for had he not halted horses at the plow so
that neither blows nor commands could move them for two hours? Had he not
set farmer Raught's pigs to walking on their hind legs and trying to
talk? When he shouted "Hup! hup! hup!" to farmer Williams's children, had
they not leaped to the moulding of the parlor wainscot,--a yard above the
floor and only an inch wide,--and walked around it, afterward skipping
like birds from chair-back to chair-back, while the furniture stood as if
nailed to the floor? And was he not the chief of thirteen night-riders,
whose faces no man had seen, nor wanted to see, and whom he sent about
the country on errands of mischief every night when the moon was growing
old? As to moons, had he not found a mystic message from our satellite on
Mount Riga, graven on a meteor?

Horses' tails were tied, hogs foamed at the mouth and walked like men,
cows gave blood for milk. These night-riders met Woolcott in a grove of
ash and chestnut trees, each furnished with a stolen bundle of oat straw,
and these bundles Woolcott changed to black horses when the night had
grown dark enough not to let the way of the change be seen. These horses
could not cross streams of water, and on the stroke of midnight they fell
to pieces and were oaten sheaves once more, but during their time of
action they rushed through woods, bearing their riders safely, and tore
like hurricanes across the fields, leaping bushes, fences, even trees,
without effort. Never could traces be found of them the next day. At last
the devil came to claim his own. Woolcott, who was ninety years old, lay
sick and helpless in his cabin. Clergymen refused to see him, but two or
three of his neighbors stifled their fears and went to the wizard's house
to soothe his dying moments. With the night came storm, and with its
outbreak the old man's face took on such a strange and horrible look that
the watchers fell back i