“We can call this a Hawthorne trip,” said Julia, as they looked at the plain wooden house where the great romancer was born, and compared notes about the various works of his that they liked best.
They walked down to the old Charter Street Burying-Ground (expressly at Julia’s request) and read the inscriptions on the old graves, and gazed at the large square house adjoining the graveyard, which is the model for the old house in “Dr. Grimshawe’s Secret.”
Finally, at Miss South’s suggestion, for she saw that they were all growing tired, they engaged a carriage, and in the hour and a half of their drive around the old town, there was little worth seeing that they left unseen.
They saw the site of the old prison where those accused of witchcraft had been held, they went into the Court House, and gazed at Bridget Bishop’s death warrant, and they wondered that even two hundred years ago so strange a delusion could have flourished in a Christian country.
“But Salem and the Puritans must n’t take the whole blame,” explained Miss South. “The New England delusion was only a faint echo of a belief in witchcraft that had persisted for a good while in various European countries. Only nineteen were hanged at Salem, yet, dreadful as it seems that any should have been victims of such a delusion, these nineteen are but a small number compared with the hundreds who, about the same time, suffered death for the same charges in other countries.”
“It’s rather strange, though, is n’t it, that the Salem
