The next day the story spread through the whole neighborhood, accumulating in interest and incident as it went.  Where it received the touches, embellishments, and emendations, with which it was amplified, it would be difficult to say; every one told it, forsooth, exactly as he heard it from another; but indeed it is not improbable, that those through whom it passed were unconscious of the additions it had received at their hands.  It is not unreasonable to suppose that imagination in such cases often colors highly without a premeditated design of falsehood.  Fear and dread, however, accompanied its progress; such families as had neglected to keep holy water in their houses borrowed some from their neighbors; every old prayer which had become rusty from disuse, was brightened up—­charms were hung about the necks of cattle—­and gospels about those of children—­crosses were placed over the doors and windows;—­no unclean water was thrown out before sunrise or after dusk—­

     “E’en those prayed now who never prayed before. 
     And those who always prayed, still prayed the more.”

The inscrutable woman who caused such general dismay in the parish was an object of much pity.  Avoided, feared, and detested, she could find no rest for her weary feet, nor any shelter for her unprotected head.  If she was seen approaching a house, the door and windows were immediately closed against her; if met on the way she was avoided as a pestilence.  How she lived no one could tell, for none would permit themselves to know.  It was asserted that she existed without meat or drink, and that she was doomed to remain possessed of life, the prey of hunger and thirst, until she could get some one weak enough to break the spell by drinking her hellish draught, to taste which, they said, would be to change places with herself, and assume her despair and misery.

There had lived in the country about six months before her appearance in it, a man named Stephenson.  He was unmarried, and the last of his family.  This person led a solitary and secluded life, and exhibited during the last years of his existence strong symptoms of eccentricity, which, for some months before his death, assumed a character of unquestionable derangement.  He was found one morning hanging by a halter in his own stable, where he had, under the influence of his malady, committed suicide.  At this time the public press had not, as now, familiarized the minds of the people to that dreadful crime, and it was consequently looked upon then with an intensity of horror, of which we can scarcely entertain any adequate notion.  His farm remained unoccupied, for while an acre of land could be obtained in any other quarter, no man would enter upon such unhallowed premises.  The house was locked up, and it was currently reported that Stephenson and the devil each night repeated the hanging scene in the stable; and that when the former was committing the “hopeless sin,” the halter slipped several times from the beam of the stable-loft, when Satan came, in the shape of a dark complexioned man with a hollow voice, and secured the rope until Stephenson’s end was accomplished.