Like a crew of demons, yelling and shouting menaces of death, mingled with horrible execrations and oaths of vengeance for their slaughtered comrades, they obeyed the energetic and sanguinary orders of their chief. The witch chanted -- "Turn the spindle! Mortal asks A web of proof From charmed woof!" "The pledge, the pledge?" replied the wizard. "Body and soul To his control, The pledge, the pledge!" "A bleeding lock Of the victim's hair Given to earth, sea, Sky, and air, The seal, the seal!"

Author Biography

Joseph Holt Ingraham (1809 - 1860) was an American author. He was born in Portland, Maine and spent several years at sea, then worked as a teacher of languages in Mississippi. In the 1840s he published work in Arthur's Magazine. He became an Episcopal clergyman on March 7, 1852. In Natchez, Ingraham married Mary Brooks, a cousin of Phillips Brooks. Under the pen-name F. Clinton Barrington he wrote stories for popular publications like Gleason's Pictorial Drawing-Room Companion. He met Henry Wadsworth Longfellow in 1846 and told him that he "has written eighty novels and of these twenty during the last year." Ingraham wrote a series of three epistolary novels on biblical themes; The Pillar of Fire, The Throne of David and The Prince of the House of David. The first of these was supposed to illustrate the beginning of Hebraic power, the second its culmination and the last its decadence. Ingraham died at the age of 51, in Holly Springs, Mississippi from an accidental, self-inflicted gunshot wound in the vestibule of his church.