Thou who makest the tale thy mirth,
  Consider that strip of Christian earth
  On the desolate shore of a sailless sea,
  Full of terror and mystery,
  Half-redeemed from the evil hold
  Of the wood so dreary and dark and old,
  Which drank with its lips of leaves the dew
  When Time was young and the world was new,
  And wove its shadows with sun and moon
  Ere the stones of Cheops were squared and hewn;
  Think of the sea’s dread monotone,
  Of the mournful wail from the pine-wood blown,
  Of the strange, vast splendors that lit the North,
  Of the troubled throes of the quaking earth,
  And the dismal tales the Indian told,
  Till the settler’s heart at his hearth grew cold,
  And he shrank from the tawny wizard’s boasts,
  And the hovering shadows seemed full of ghosts,
  And above, below, and on every side,
  The fear of his creed seemed verified;—­
  And think, if his lot were now thine own,
  To grope with terrors nor named nor known,
  How laxer muscle and weaker nerve
  And a feebler faith thy need might serve;
  And own to thyself the wonder more
  That the snake had two heads and not a score!

  Whether he lurked in the Oldtown fen,
  Or the gray earth-flax of the Devil’s Den,
  Or swam in the wooded Artichoke,
  Or coiled by the Northman’s Written Rock,
  Nothing on record is left to show;
  Only the fact that he lived, we know,
  And left the cast of a “double head”
  In the scaly mask which he yearly shed. 
  For he carried a head where his tail should be,
  And the two, of course, could never agree,
  But wriggled about with main and might,
  Now to the left and now to the right;
  Pulling and twisting this way and that,
  Neither knew what the other was at.

  A snake with two heads, 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 whirr 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 posting down
  All the way to Newbury town,
  With his eyes agog and his ears set wide,