and women; and if their creed in the lapse of time has lost something of
its vigor, the influence of their ethical righteousness still endures.
The prophecy of Samuel Sewall that Christians should be found in Newbury
so long as pigeons shall roost on its oaks and Indian corn grows in
Oldtown fields remains still true, and we trust will always remain so.
Yet, as of old, the evil personage sometimes intrudes himself into
company too good for him. It was said in the witchcraft trials of 1692
that Satan baptized his converts at Newbury Falls, the scene, probably,
of one of Hawthorne's weird _Twice Told Tales_; and there is a tradition
that, in the midst of a heated controversy between one of Newbury's
painful ministers and his deacon, who (anticipating Garrison by a
century) ventured to doubt the propriety of clerical slaveholding, the
Adversary made his appearance in the shape of a black giant stalking
through Byfield. It was never, I believe, definitely settled whether he
was drawn there by the minister's zeal in defence of slavery or the
deacon's irreverent denial of the minister's right and duty to curse
Canaan in the person of his negro.

Old Newbury has sometimes been spoken of as ultra-conservative and
hostile to new ideas and progress, but this is not warranted by its
history. More than two centuries ago, when Major Pike, just across the
river, stood up and denounced in open town meeting the law against
freedom of conscience and worship, and was in consequence fined and
outlawed, some of Newbury's best citizens stood bravely by him. The town
took no part in the witchcraft horror, and got none of its old women and
town charges hanged for witches, "Goody" Morse had the spirit rappings in
her house two hundred years earlier than the Fox girls did, and somewhat
later a Newbury minister, in wig and knee-buckles, rode, Bible in hand,
over to Hampton to lay a ghost who had materialized himself and was
stamping up and down stairs in his military boots.