Narrative and Legendary Poems, Complete eBook

A snake with two beads, lurking so near! 
Judge of the wonder, guess at the fear! 
Think what ancient gossips might say,
Shaking their heads in their dreary way,
Between the meetings on Sabbath-day! 
How urchins, searching at day’s decline
The Common Pasture for sheep or kine,
The terrible double-ganger heard
In leafy rustle or whir of bird! 
Think what a zest it gave to the sport,
In berry-time, of the younger sort,
As over pastures blackberry-twined,
Reuben and Dorothy lagged behind,
And closer and closer, for fear of harm,
The maiden clung to her lover’s arm;
And how the spark, who was forced to stay,
By his sweetheart’s fears, till the break of day,
Thanked the snake for the fond delay.

Far and wide the tale was told,
Like a snowball growing while it rolled. 
The nurse hushed with it the baby’s cry;
And it served, in the worthy minister’s eye,
To paint the primitive serpent by. 
Cotton Mather came galloping down
All the way to Newbury town,
With his eyes agog and his ears set wide,
And his marvellous inkhorn at his side;
Stirring the while in the shallow pool
Of his brains for the lore he learned at school,
To garnish the story, with here a streak
Of Latin, and there another of Greek
And the tales he heard and the notes he took,
Behold! are they not in his Wonder-Book?

Stories, like dragons, are hard to kill. 
If the snake does not, the tale runs still
In Byfield Meadows, on Pipestave Hill. 
And still, whenever husband and wife
Publish the shame of their daily strife,
And, with mad cross-purpose, tug and strain
At either end of the marriage-chain,
The gossips say, with a knowing shake
Of their gray heads, “Look at the Double Snake
One in body and two in will,
The Amphisbaena is living still!”
1859.

MABEL MARTIN.

A harvest idyl.

Susanna Martin, an aged woman of Amesbury, Mass., was tried and executed for the alleged crime of witchcraft.  Her home was in what is now known as Pleasant Valley on the Merrimac, a little above the old Ferry way, where, tradition says, an attempt was made to assassinate Sir Edmund Andros on his way to Falmouth (afterward Portland) and Pemaquid, which was frustrated by a warning timely given.  Goody Martin was the only woman hanged on the north side of the Merrimac during the dreadful delusion.  The aged wife of Judge Bradbury who lived on the other side of the Powow River was imprisoned and would have been put to death but for the collapse of the hideous persecution.

The substance of the poem which follows was published under the name of The Witch’s Daughter, in The National Era in 1857.  In 1875 my publishers desired to issue it with illustrations, and I then enlarged it and otherwise altered it to its present form.  The principal addition was in the verses which constitute Part I.