He was, in fact, an odd mixture of small shrewdness and simple
credulity. His appetite for the marvellous and his powers of
digesting it were equally extraordinary, and both had been
increased by his residence in this spellbound region. No tale was
too gross or monstrous for his capacious swallow. It was often
his delight, after his school was dismissed in the afternoon, to
stretch himself on the rich bed of clover bordering the little
brook that whimpered by his school-house, and there con over old
Mather's direful tales until the gathering dusk of the evening
made the printed page a mere mist before his eyes. Then, as he
wended his way by swamp and stream and awful woodland to the
farmhouse where he happened to be quartered, every sound of
Nature at that witching hour fluttered his excited
imagination--the moan of the whip-poor-will* from the hillside;
the boding cry of the tree-toad, that harbinger of storm; the
dreary hooting of the screech-owl, or the sudden rustling in the
thicket of birds frightened from their roost. The fire-flies,
too, which sparkled most vividly in the darkest places, now and
then startled him as one of uncommon brightness would stream
across his path; and if, by chance, a huge blockhead of a beetle
came winging his blundering flight against him, the poor varlet
was ready to give up the ghost, with the idea that he was struck
with a witch's token.
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