IV

THE MANIA OF COLLECTING SEIZES ME

Captivity Waite never approved of my fondness for fairy
literature. She shared the enthusiasm which I expressed whenever
``Robinson Crusoe'' was mentioned; there was just enough
seriousness in De Foe's romance, just enough piety to appeal for
sympathy to one of Captivity Waite's religious turn of mind.
When it came to fiction involving witches, ogres, and flubdubs,
that was too much for Captivity, and the spirit of the little
Puritan revolted.

Yet I have the documentary evidence to prove that Captivity's
ancestors (both paternal and maternal) were, in the palmy
colonial times, as abject slaves to superstition as could well be
imagined. The Waites of Salem were famous persecutors of
witches, and Sinai Higginbotham (Captivity's great-great-
grandfather on her mother's side of the family) was Cotton
Mather's boon companion, and rode around the gallows with that
zealous theologian on that memorable occasion when five young
women were hanged at Danvers upon the charge of having tormented
little children with their damnable arts of witchcraft. Human
thought is like a monstrous pendulum: it keeps swinging from one
extreme to the other. Within the compass of five generations we
find the Puritan first an uncompromising believer in demonology