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My pilgrimage to the wise men of the East
My pilgrimage to the wise men of the East Author:Moncure Daniel Conway Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER H A witch hunt at Washington — Yellow Springs, Ohio — Cincinnati — Judge Hoadly — Journey to Salt Lake City — John W. Young — Mor- monism and human na... more »ture — Elder Penrose as a preacher — Mormon wives and Mormon husbands — The fate of repudiated wives. AT Washington I had a strange witch hunt! James Parker, once the body-servant of my father, — to remain with whom he had actually fled from freedom with the Northern troops to the Confederate lines, — had settled with his family in Washington. He had a beautiful mulatto daughter who was employed by the wife of a high government official as her maid, but shortly before my arrival the girl (about nineteen) began to waste away. Her mistress was much attached to her, and the. best physicians were consulted, but none could explain the ailment that was apparently carrying her to the grave. When I called on her she barely raised her head, saying, " I am sorry for you to see me in this condition." My effort to get from her some explanation was fruitless. When I asked her if she was in love she shook her head, and it was the same when I suggested religious trouble. But I saw that the ailment was mental, and on questioning her father closely he admitted, with some shame, that his daughter once said to him that she feared she was bewitched. With that clue I consulted her employer, and a searching investigation revealed a strange situation. The black cook, having become jealous of their mistress's devotion to the mulatto maid, determined to frighten her away. Knowing that the girl was sensitive and imaginative, shesought to make her believe herself bewitched, and one morning the maid in making up her bed found beneath the mattress at each corner some bags of powdered glass, with scrawled letters and figures. The cook had kept her f...« less