The air was cool, the sky clear, and the lingering twilight was made
brighter by the rays of a young moon which had now nearly reached the
verge of the horizon. The traveller, a man of middle age, wrapped in a
gray frieze cloak, quickened his pace when he had reached the
outskirts of the town, for a gloomy extent of nearly four miles lay
between him and his home. The low straw-thatched houses were scattered
at considerable intervals along the road, and, the country having been
settled but about thirty years, the tracts of original forest still
bore no small proportion to the cultivated ground. The autumn wind
wandered among the branches, whirling away the leaves from all except
the pine trees and moaning as if it lamented the desolation of which
it was the instrument. The road had penetrated the mass of woods that
lay nearest to the town, and was just emerging into an open space,
when the traveller's ears were saluted by a sound more mournful than
even that of the wind. It was like the wailing of some one in
distress, and it seemed to proceed from beneath a tall and lonely fir
tree in the centre of a cleared but unenclosed and uncultivated field.
The Puritan could not but remember that this was the very spot which
had been made accursed a few hours before by the execution of the
Quakers, whose bodies had been thrown together into one hasty grave
beneath the tree on which they suffered. He struggled, however,
against the superstitious fears which belonged to the age, and
compelled himself to pause and listen.

"The voice is most likely mortal, nor have I cause to tremble if it be
otherwise," thought he, straining his eyes through the dim moonlight.
"Methinks it is like the wailing of a child--some infant, it may be,
which has strayed from its mother and chanced upon this place of
death. For the ease of mine own conscience I must search this matter
out." He therefore left the path and walked somewhat fearfully across