“It’s a nice walk. Completely harmless these days, as long as you stay on the trail. But those omens … You have to see them as a primitive form of meteorology, except it’s not the weather they’re predicting; it’s impending disaster. You know the Salem witch trials, of course, which happened some twenty or thirty years later in the Massachusetts Bay Colony. They were preceded by a failed harvest, a smallpox epidemic, and the constant threat of attack by native tribes. The connection wasn’t made until afterward, but that doesn’t matter. From then on, fear played an enormous role in the flow of
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