STRAY BITS BOUND INTO A SHEAF. 185
for this purpose. In looking over the record of the alumni, we find but one of the race who graduated at Hanover. He was in the class of 1777, and he studied theology, and became a preacher, and ministered to the Stockbridge Indians in Massachusetts, but he was suspended from the ministry about 1783, for drunkenness. In those days a minister must have been a pretty hard toper to have incurred such a penalty, since it was no disgrace for a clergyman to be a little boosy occasionally. Civilized Indians are like black swans, exceedingly rare birds ; we do not see them even among those of New England, who have come into close contact with our own mstitutions and education for two cen- turies. Learning does not wean .them from a wild life. A gentleman, a clergy- man and a scholar, was taking a walk in the western part of New York lately, with a book in his hand, reading and looking at the landscape alternately. He came near a group of Indian basket-makers, and a red-man of the party asked what book the stranger was reading. It was a (ireek Testament. The Indian took it and proved that he could read Greek quite creditably ; but with all his learning, he preferred the life of a basket-maker, camping in the woods, to that of civilized men.
��The Flying Giant. Occultism seems to move in centennial cycles, at least in Anierica. Three centuries ago, the converted Indians of Spanish America became possessed with the Devil, as the priests termed it, and they had their hands full in exorcising him. The next century saw the advent of New England witch-craft. This croj)ped out again a hundred years ago, in the Middle and Southern State's, where there were several executions. While it- took on a new phase at the North, illustrated in the vicinity of Seabrook, N. H., by the notorious meal-chest affair on Spofford's Hill, Georgetown, and by manifestations at Byfield, Rowley, and Ipswich, which according to tradition, paralleled all the principal phenomena which under the name of spiritualism, have come round again with the century, though as if the circle were a spiral, on a higher plane. It is now a little over a hundred years according to an article from the pen of Deacon Benjamin Colman, published in the New Hamp- shire " Packet, since the " Flying Giant " spread consternation through Byfield, Mass., the majority of the people. Rev. Moses Parsons, their spiritual leader included, believing it to be the Devil taking a walk, to oversee his earthly affairs as described in Smthey's poem. A member of the '• Theosophical Society," assures us it was a materialization of an " elementary spirit," or one not yet embodied in a permanent human form. The following description is from the diary of an eye witness, an officer of the church, under date of April 27, 1778. An account of it was also published in the Essex /"<?«;'««/, and the New Hampshire paper referred to. At that time Deacon Colman was holding his celebrated newspaper controversy with Mr. Parsons on the slavery ques- tion, and he thought there was some connection between Mr. Parson's sin of slaveholding and this diabolical manifestation in his parish. " Yesterday, being the Lord's day, the first Sunday after Easter, about five of the clock in the p. . M., a most terrible, and as most men do conceive supernatural thing took place. A form as of a giant, I suppose rather under than over twenty feet high, walked through the air from somewhere nigh the Governor's school, where it was first spied by some boys bathing (we presume the boys were bathing — not the giant), till it past the meeting-house ; where Mr. Whittam, who was driving home his cows, saw it as well as the cows also, which ran violently bellowing. Sundry on the whole road from the meeting-house to Deacon Searle's house, saw and heard it, till it vanished from sight nigh Hunslow's Hill, as Deacon Searles saw. It strode so fast as a good horse might gallop, and two or three feet above the ground, and what more than all we admired, it went through
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