"Let us hear which will laugh loudest. Think not to frighten me
with your deviltry. Come witch, come wizard, come Indian powwow,
come devil himself, and here comes Goodman Brown. You may as well
fear him as he fear you."

In truth, all through the haunted forest there could be nothing
more frightful than the figure of Goodman Brown. On he flew among
the black pines, brandishing his staff with frenzied gestures,
now giving vent to an inspiration of horrid blasphemy, and now
shouting forth such laughter as set all the echoes of the forest
laughing like demons around him. The fiend in his own shape is
less hideous than when he rages in the breast of man. Thus sped
the demoniac on his course, until, quivering among the trees, he
saw a red light before him, as when the felled trunks and
branches of a clearing have been set on fire, and throw up their
lurid blaze against the sky, at the hour of midnight. He paused,
in a lull of the tempest that had driven him onward, and heard
the swell of what seemed a hymn, rolling solemnly from a distance
with the weight of many voices. He knew the tune; it was a
familiar one in the choir of the village meeting-house. The verse
died heavily away, and was lengthened by a chorus, not of human
voices, but of all the sounds of the benighted wilderness pealing
in awful harmony together. Goodman Brown cried out, and his cry
was lost to his own ear by its unison with the cry of the desert.

In the interval of silence he stole forward until the light
glared full upon his eyes. At one extremity of an open space,
hemmed in by the dark wall of the forest, arose a rock, bearing
some rude, natural resemblance either to an alter or a pulpit,
and surrounded by four blazing pines, their tops aflame, their