inward state. [Endnote: 5.]

Dreading lest some one of these ponderous anathemas should alight,
reason or none, on his own head, the man crept away, and whispered the
thing to his cronies, from whom it was communicated to the townspeople
at large, and so became one of many stories circulating with reference
to our grim hero, which, if not true to the fact, had undoubtedly a
degree of appositeness to his character, of which they were the
legitimate flowers and symbols. If the anathemas took no other effect,
they seemed to have produced a very remarkable one on the unfortunate
elm tree, through the naked branches of which the Doctor discharged
this fiendish shot. For, the next spring, when April came, no tender
leaves budded forth, no life awakened there; and never again, on that
old elm, widely as its roots were imbedded among the dead of many
years, was there rustling bough in the summer time, or the elm's early
golden boughs in September; and after waiting till another spring to
give it a fair chance of reviving, it was cut down and made into
coffins, and burnt on the sexton's hearth. The general opinion was that
the grim Doctor's awful profanity had blasted that tree, fostered, as
it had been, on grave-mould of Puritans. In Lancashire they tell of a
similar anathema. It had a very frightful effect, it must be owned,
this idea of a man cherishing emotions in his breast of so horrible a
nature that he could neither tell them to any human being, nor keep
them in their plenitude and intensity within the breast where they had
their germ, and so was forced to fling them forth upon the night, to
pollute and put fear into the atmosphere, and that people should
breathe-in somewhat of horror from an unknown source, and be affected
with nightmare, and dreams in which they were startled at their own
wickedness.