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before. One night he was on his way to his cabin after finishing this chore when he heard the ominous voice address him from the darkness.
    "Go right over to Mr. James Johnson's and cut wood and kindling for his morning's fires. He and his folks are sick, and I told him I would send you. James Johnson is the best man in this county. Your master will be glad I sent you; don't stop to ask him."
    The Johnson house was half a mile away, and Harry must have been very tired. But he said he hurried—and I believe him. Mr. Johnson was expecting him. The Spirit had already spoken to him.
    "It will be no trouble, Harry just likes to make fires on cold mornings," it said, with the sardonic humor it sometimes displayed. "If you are going to be sick long, Harry will come every day and see to your fires. I'll tell his master to send him and he will be glad to have it done."
    Several of the other slaves felt the effect of the Spirit's disapproval, but it abused the members of the family even more.
    The three younger boys, Joel, Richard, and Drew, all suffered from the Spirit's invisible hands. It pulled the covers off their beds, threw sticks and stones at them from the bushes along the road when they walked to school, slapped them and pulled their hair. Once when Drew was leaning against a heavy piece of furniture it yanked the support away from him so that he fell to the floor and bruised himself badly.
    By contrast, the Spirit's behavior toward John Junior was curiously considerate. It never laid hands on him, and it addressed him in an almost apologetic manner. He was not at all afraid of it, and as its behavior worsened, he often threatened and cursed it. Once it admitted that it liked him because he had the courage to talk back to it.
    "I will try to tell you of more pleasant things next time," it said, adding airily, "au plaisir de vous revoir." We are told that the Spirit spoke all languages fluently, but this is the only specific example that has survived.
    The Spirit, you see, had its amiable side. It was not an unmixed disaster for the Bells or for the neighborhood. Few examples of misbehavior went unnoticed, and it always reported these, in sanctimonious tones, to the chagrin of the parties concerned. Some of the neighbors ruefully admitted that the moral tone of the community had never been higher. A man who might be tempted to beat a slave or abuse his children would refrain, knowing that by nightfall everybody in the area would know about it. It must have been like having a policeman always at one's side.
    For some of the Bells, however, its presence was far from pleasant. It never ceased to threaten Mr. Bell, and as the summer of 1819 approached, another of its purposes became apparent.

EIGHT
    "Mid woodland bowers and grassy dell
    Dwelt pretty blue-eyed Betsy Bell.
    But elvin phantoms cursed the dell
    And sylvan witches all unseen
    Wielded scepter o'er this queen."
     
    The woodcut accompanying this bit of doggerel in a book written some years later does not flatter Miss Betsy. She resembles a witch herself, with her hair in wild disarray and her hands raised in horror. If she had been a lady of high degree in old Scotland (a region much afflicted with witchcraft, it seems), some Highland minstrel might have immortalized her sufferings in better verse, and a handsomer portrait might have been painted. But perhaps she was better off as she was. In a less enlightened age she might have been condemned for witchcraft, or sent some other poor wretch to a grisly death.
    I told you Betsy was the heroine of this tale of Gothic horror, and I stick to that opinion, even though the Spirit itself is the major character. A good many clues suggest that it was of the female gender, but it is hard to ascribe sexual identity to a disembodied voice, and we cannot call the Spirit a heroine unless we are willing to apply the same term to characters like Medea and Messalina.
    Betsy is certainly a central figure. Any theory that attempts to