that the old man ate the captured animals, though the butcher declared that Hawksley bought the best of beef and mutton. The charitable argued that the brutes were killed to release them from misery, but immediate neighbors shook their heads at this suggestion, for they remembered many nights—usually wild and stormy—when strange noises of barking and growling dogs, and still more inexplicable animal sounds, came from behind the chemist's door. Never a sign of anything of the kind was heard or seen by day, however, and if the weather permitted, the shop door stood well ajar, while the windows and curtains of the single story above were wide to the world, and canaries sang merrily there in their cages.
Sometimes screaming parrots or frolicsome squirrels took the place of the canaries, and altogether it might have been thought that Hawksley possessed a miniature menagerie but for the fact of lack of space. There were certainly no animals in the upper story, nor room for so many in the cellar as had been traced to the premises, to say nothing of long periods of unbroken silence, so the generally accepted belief made Hawksley a magician, at whose command birds and beasts appeared and disappeared.
Such benevolent actions as were sometimes reported of Hawksley were also attributed to his magical powers. On one occasion, when a friendless child was knocked down by a horse and taken up with a broken leg, it was the old chemist who bore the little sufferer tenderly away, closed the shop door in the faces of a gaping crowd, afraid to enter, and told them that he would care for and cure the foundling. The very next day the lad came forth completely sound and well, without a scar to tell of the fracture of a limb. Again, an old cripple, bent with rheumatism—a stranger in Salem—stopped to ask alms of the chemist. He entered without fear, and twenty-four hours later departed, erect and agile.
The neighbors called these cures sorcery. The rheumatic beggar could tell nothing of his cure, except that Hawksley had given him something to drink, and that presently he awoke from sleep to find himself free from shooting pains, and well and young again in his feelings. He did not know from his own consciousness whether the cure had taken an hour, a day or a year. He oniy knew that he was cured and could work instead of beg.
