第75章 THE MASQUERADERS(3)

Among them was an Indian chief, with blanket, feathers, and war-paint, and uplifted tomahawk; and near him, looking fit to be his woodland bride, the goddess Diana, with the crescent on her head, and attended by our big lazy dog, in lack of any fleeter hound.Drawing an arrow from her quiver, she let it fly at a venture, and hit the very tree behind which Ihappened to be lurking.Another group consisted of a Bavarian broom-girl, a negro of the Jim Crow order, one or two foresters of the Middle Ages, a Kentucky woodsman in his trimmed hunting-shirt and deerskin leggings, and a Shaker elder, quaint, demure, broad-brimmed, and square-skirted.

Shepherds of Arcadia, and allegoric figures from the "Faerie Queen," were oddly mixed up with these.Arm in arm, or otherwise huddled together in strange discrepancy, stood grim Puritans, gay Cavaliers, and Revolutionary officers with three-cornered cocked hats, and queues longer than their swords.A bright-complexioned, dark-haired, vivacious little gypsy, with a red shawl over her head, went from one group to another, telling fortunes by palmistry; and Moll Pitcher, the renowned old witch of Lynn, broomstick in hand, showed herself prominently in the midst, as if announcing all these apparitions to be the offspring of her necromantic art.But Silas Foster, who leaned against a tree near by, in his customary blue frock and smoking a short pipe, did more to disenchant the scene, with his look of shrewd, acrid, Yankee observation, than twenty witches and necromancers could have done in the way of rendering it weird and fantastic.

A little farther off, some old-fashioned skinkers and drawers, all with portentously red noses, were spreading a banquet on the leaf-strewn earth;while a horned and long-tailed gentleman (in whom I recognized the fiendish musician erst seen by Tam O'Shanter) tuned his fiddle, and summoned the whole motley rout to a dance, before partaking of the festal cheer.So they joined hands in a circle, whirling round so swiftly, so madly, and so merrily, in time and tune with the Satanic music, that their separate incongruities were blended all together, and they became a kind of entanglement that went nigh to turn one's brain with merely looking at it.Anon they stopt all of a sudden, and staring at one another's figures, set up a roar of laughter; whereat a shower of the September leaves (which, all day long, had been hesitating whether to fall or no) were shaken off by the movement of the air, and came eddying down upon the revellers.

Then, for lack of breath, ensued a silence, at the deepest point of which, tickled by the oddity of surprising my grave associates in this masquerading trim, I could not possibly refrain from a burst of laughter on my own separate account;"Hush!" I heard the pretty gypsy fortuneteller say."Who is that laughing?""Some profane intruder!" said the goddess Diana."I shall send an arrow through his heart, or change him into a stag, as I did Actaeon, if he peeps from behind the trees!""Me take his scalp!" cried the Indian chief, brandishing his tomahawk, and cutting a great caper in the air.

"I'll root him in the earth with a spell that I have at my tongue's end!"squeaked Moll Pitcher."And the green moss shall grow all over him, before he gets free again!""The voice was Miles Coverdale's," said the fiendish fiddler, with a whisk of his tail and a toss of his horns."My music has brought him hither.He is always ready to dance to the Devil's tune!"Thus put on the right track, they all recognized the voice at once, and set up a simultaneous shout.

"Miles! Miles! Miles Coverdale, where are you?" they cried."Zenobia!

Queen Zenobia! here is one of your vassals lurking in the wood.

Command him to approach and pay his duty!"The whole fantastic rabble forthwith streamed off in pursuit of me, so that I was like a mad poet hunted by chimeras.Having fairly the start of them, however, I succeeded in making my escape, and soon left their merriment and riot at a good distance in the rear.Its fainter tones assumed a kind of mournfulness, and were finally lost in the hush and solemnity of the wood.In my haste, I stumbled over a heap of logs and sticks that had been cut for firewood, a great while ago, by some former possessor of the soil, and piled up square, in order to be carted or sledded away to the farmhouse.But, being forgotten, they had lain there perhaps fifty years, and possibly much longer; until, by the accumulation of moss, and the leaves falling over them, and decaying there, from autumn to autumn, a green mound was formed, in which the softened outline of the woodpile was still perceptible.In the fitful mood that then swayed my mind, I found something strangely affecting in this simple circumstance.I imagined the long-dead woodman, and his long-dead wife and children, coming out of their chill graves, and essaying to make a fire with this heap of mossy fuel!

From this spot I strayed onward, quite lost in reverie, and neither knew nor cared whither I was going, until a low, soft, well-remembered voice spoke, at a little distance.

"There is Mr.Coverdale!"

"Miles Coverdale!" said another voice,--and its tones were very stern.

"Let him come forward, then!"

"Yes, Mr.Coverdale," cried a woman's voice,--clear and melodious, but, just then, with something unnatural in its chord,--"you are welcome! But you come half an hour too late, and have missed a scene which you would have enjoyed!"I looked up and found myself nigh Eliot's pulpit, at the base of which sat Hollingsworth, with Priscilla at his feet and Zenobia standing before them.