at domestic worship, and the holy words of his prayer were heard
through the open window. "What God doth the wizard pray to?"
quoth Goodman Brown. Goody Cloyse, that excellent old Christian,
stood in the early sunshine at her own lattice, catechizing a
little girl who had brought her a pint of morning's milk. Goodman
Brown snatched away the child as from the grasp of the fiend
himself. Turning the corner by the meeting-house, he spied the
head of Faith, with the pink ribbons, gazing anxiously forth, and
bursting into such joy at sight of him that she skipped along the
street and almost kissed her husband before the whole village.
But Goodman Brown looked sternly and sadly into her face, and
passed on without a greeting.

Had Goodman Brown fallen asleep in the forest and only dreamed a
wild dream of a witch-meeting?

Be it so if you will; but, alas! it was a dream of evil omen for
young Goodman Brown. A stern, a sad, a darkly meditative, a
distrustful, if not a desperate man did he become from the night
of that fearful dream. On the Sabbath day, when the congregation
were singing a holy psalm, he could not listen because an anthem
of sin rushed loudly upon his ear and drowned all the blessed
strain. When the minister spoke from the pulpit with power and
fervid eloquence, and, with his hand on the open Bible, of the
sacred truths of our religion, and of saint-like lives and
triumphant deaths, and of future bliss or misery unutterable,
then did Goodman Brown turn pale, dreading lest the roof should
thunder down upon the gray blasphemer and his hearers. Often,
waking suddenly at midnight, he shrank from the bosom of Faith;
and at morning or eventide, when the family knelt down at prayer,