The following day, just after dinner, I was writing in the library, when a child’s cry of fright and pain startled me.  It seemed to come from the little yard behind the house, and I hurried thither to behold a singular sight.  There was one apple-tree in the yard,—­an old, stunted, crooked thing; and in that tree I found my son and heir, Tip, tied fast with a small stout rope.  “Tied” does not express it; he was gagged, manacled, twisted, contorted, wound about, crossed and recrossed, held without a chance of motion, scarcely of breath.

“You never tied yourself up here, child?” I asked, as I cut the knots.

The question certainly was unnecessary.  No juggler could have bound himself in such a fashion; scarcely, then, a four-years’ child.  To my continued, clear, and gentle inquiries, the boy replied, persistently and consistently, that nobody tied him there,—­“not Cousin Gertrude, nor Bridget, nor the baby, nor mamma, nor Jane, nor papa, nor the black kitty”; he was “just tooken up all at once into the tree, and that was all there was about it.”  He “s’posed it must have been God, or something like that, did it.”

Poor Tip had a hard time of it.  Two days after that, while his mother and I sat discussing the incident, and the child was at play upon the floor, he suddenly threw himself at full length, writhing with pain, and begging to “have them pulled out quick!”

“Have what pulled out?” exclaimed his terrified mother.  She took the child into her lap, and found that he was stuck over from head to foot with large white pins.

“We haven’t so many large pins in all the house,” she said as soon as he was relieved.

As she spoke the words thirty or forty small pins pierced the boy.  Where they came from no one could see.  How they came there no one knew.  We looked, and there they were, and Tip was crying and writhing as before.

For the remainder of that winter we had scarcely a day of quiet.  The rumor that “the Hotchkisses had rented a haunted house” leaked out and spread abroad.  The frightened servants gave warning, and other frightened servants took their place, to leave in turn.  My wife was her own cook and nursery-maid a quarter of the time.  The disturbances varied in character with every week, assuming, as time went on, an importunity which, had we not quietly settled it in our own minds “not to be beaten by a noise,” would have driven us from the house.

Night after night the mysterious fingers rapped at the windows, the doors, the floors, the walls.  Day after day uncomfortable tricks were sprung upon us by invisible agencies.  We became used to the noises, so that we slept through them easily; but many of the phenomena were so strikingly unpleasant, and so singularly unsuited to the ordinary conditions of human happiness and housekeeping, that we scarcely became—­as one of our excellent deacons had a cheerful habit of exhorting us to become—­“resigned.”