[adapted]

by
Nathaniel Hawthorne

“Dickon,” called Mother Rigby, “a coal to light my pipe!”

The pipe was in the old woman’s mouth when she said these words. She had put it there after filling it with tobacco, but without bending down to light it at the fireplace, where, in fact, there was no sign that a fire had been started that morning. At once, however, as soon as the order was given, there was a strong red glow from the bowl of the pipe, and a small puff of smoke came from Mother Rigby’s lips. Where the coal came from, and how it was brought there by an invisible hand, I have never been able to find out.

“Good!” said Mother Rigby, with a nod of her head. “Thank you, Dickon! And now to make this scarecrow. Stay close by, Dickon, in case I need you again.”

The good woman had got up this early (for it was not yet sunrise) to start making a scarecrow, which she planned to put in the middle of her corn field. It was now the last week of May, and the crows and blackbirds had already found the small, green, rolled-up leaf of the corn just coming out of the ground. She was determined, for that reason, to make as real-looking a scarecrow as ever was seen, and to finish it at once, from head to toe, so that it should begin its guard work that very morning. Now Mother Rigby (as everybody had heard) was one of the most clever and powerful witches in New England, and could, with very little effort, have made a scarecrow so ugly it would scare the minister himself. But this time, since she had woken up in an unusually good mood, and felt even better after smoking her pipe, she decided to make something fine, beautiful, and wonderful, rather than ugly and terrible.

“I don’t want to set up a scary goblin in my own cornfield, and almost at my own doorstep,” said Mother Rigby to herself, puffing out a little bit of smoke; “I could do it if I wanted, but I’m tired of doing amazing things, and so I’ll stick to every-day business just for a change. Besides, there is no use in scaring the little children for a mile around, though it is true I’m a witch.”

It was decided, then, in her own mind, that the scarecrow should look like a fine gentleman of that time, as much as the things at hand would allow. Perhaps it is good to list the main parts that were used to make this figure.

The most important thing of all, probably, although it did not look like much, was a certain broomstick, on which Mother Rigby had taken many light rides in the air at midnight, and which now served the scarecrow as a spinal column, or, as plain people say, a backbone. One of its arms was a broken flail which used to be used by Goodman Rigby, before his wife worried him to death; the other, if I am not wrong, was made of the pudding stick and a broken bar of a chair, tied loosely together at the elbow. As for its legs, the right was a hoe handle, and the left a plain and random stick from the woodpile. Its lungs, stomach, and other things of that kind were nothing better than a meal bag stuffed with straw. Thus we have made out the skeleton and whole body of the scarecrow, except for its head; and this was very well supplied by a somewhat dried and shriveled pumpkin, in which Mother Rigby cut two holes for the eyes and a slit for the mouth, leaving a bluish-colored knob in the middle to stand for a nose. It was really quite a respectable face.

“I’ve seen worse ones on human shoulders, anyway,” said Mother Rigby. “And many fine gentlemen have a pumpkin head, just like my scarecrow.”

But the clothes, in this case, would make the man. So the good old woman took down from a peg a very old dark purple coat made in London, and with leftover fancy stitching on its seams, cuffs, pocket-flaps, and button-holes, but sadly worn and faded, patched at the elbows, torn at the skirts, and thin and worn all over. On the left chest was a round hole, from which either a star of nobility had been torn off, or else the hot heart of some former wearer had burned it through and through. The neighbors said that this rich piece of clothing belonged to the Black Man’s wardrobe, and that he kept it at Mother Rigby’s cottage so it was easy to slip it on whenever he wanted to make a grand appearance at the governor’s table. To match the coat there was a velvet waistcoat of very large size, and once embroidered with leaves that had been as brightly golden as the maple leaves in October, but which had now quite vanished from the velvet.

Next came a pair of bright red short pants, once worn by the French governor of Louisbourg, and whose knees had touched the lower step of the throne of Louis the Great. The Frenchman had given these short pants to an Indian medicine man, who traded them to the old witch for a small cup of strong drink, at one of their dances in the forest. Then, Mother Rigby took out a pair of silk stockings and put them on the figure’s legs, where they looked as unreal as a dream, with the two wooden sticks showing plainly through the holes. Lastly, she put her dead husband’s wig on the bare head of the pumpkin, and topped the whole with a dusty three-cornered hat, with the longest tail feather of a rooster stuck in it.

Then the old woman stood the figure up in a corner of her cottage and laughed softly to see its yellow look of a face, with its little round nose stuck up in the air. It had a strangely proud look, and seemed to say, “Come look at me!”

“And you are very good to look at, that’s a fact!” said Mother Rigby, admiring her own work. “I’ve made many puppets since I became a witch, but I think this is the best of them all. It is almost too good for a scarecrow. And, by the way, I’ll just fill a new pipe with tobacco and then take him out to the corn patch.”

While filling her pipe the old woman kept looking with almost motherly love at the figure in the corner. To say the truth, whether it was chance, or skill, or plain witchcraft, there was something very human in this silly shape, dressed up with its torn fine clothes; and as for the face, it seemed to wrinkle its yellow skin into a grin — a funny kind of look between dislike and fun, as if it knew it was a joke at mankind. The more Mother Rigby looked the more pleased she was.

“Dickon,” she said sharply, “another coal for my pipe!”

She had hardly spoken when, just as before, there was a red, glowing coal on top of the tobacco. She took in a long puff and blew it out again into the beam of morning sunshine that came through the one dusty glass of her cottage window. Mother Rigby always liked to give her pipe a special taste with a burning coal from the special chimney corner from where this had been brought. But where that chimney corner might be, or who brought the coal from it, — except that the unseen messenger seemed to answer to the name of Dickon, — I cannot say.

“That puppet over there,” thought Mother Rigby, still looking at the scarecrow, “is too well made to stand all summer in a corn field, scaring away the crows and blackbirds. He can do better things. Why, I’ve danced with a worse one, when partners were hard to find, at our witch meetings in the forest! What if I let him try his luck among the other straw men and empty men who hurry around the world?”

The old witch took three or four more puffs on her pipe and smiled.

“He’ll meet plenty of his kind at every street corner!” she continued. “Well; I didn’t mean to play with magic today, more than the lighting of my pipe, but a witch I am, and a witch I’m likely to be, and there’s no use trying to avoid it. I’ll make my scarecrow into a man, even if only for the joke’s sake!”

While saying these words quietly, Mother Rigby took the pipe from her own mouth and pushed it into the crack that showed the same part on the pumpkin face of the scarecrow.

“Puff, dear, puff!” she said. “Puff more, my good man! your life depends on it!”

This was a strange command, surely, to be said to a mere thing of sticks, straw, and old clothes, with only a dried-up pumpkin for a head, — as we know was true for the scarecrow. Even so, as we must carefully remember, Mother Rigby was a witch of special power and skill; and, keeping this fact clearly in our minds, we will see nothing unbelievable in the strange events of our story. In fact, the great difficulty will be solved at once, if we can only make ourselves believe that, as soon as the old woman told him to puff, there came a small puff of smoke from the scarecrow’s mouth. It was the very weakest of puffs, to be sure; but it was followed by another and another, each stronger than the one before.

“Keep puffing, my pet! keep puffing, my pretty one!” Mother Rigby kept saying, with her nicest smile. “It is the breath that gives you life; and you may take my word for it.”

Without any doubt the pipe was under a spell. There must have been magic either in the tobacco or in the brightly glowing coal that in a strange way burned on top of it, or in the strong, sweet-smelling smoke which came out from the lit tobacco. The figure, after a few unsure tries at last blew out a cloud of smoke reaching all the way from the dark corner into the bar of sunshine. There it moved in circles and faded away among the tiny bits of dust. It seemed a shaky effort; for the next two or three puffs were weaker, although the coal still glowed and threw a light over the scarecrow’s face.

The old witch clapped her thin hands together, and smiled happily at her work. She saw that the magic worked well. The wrinkled, yellow face, which before now had been no face at all, already had a thin, strange mist, as if it were like a human, moving back and forth across it; sometimes disappearing completely, but becoming clearer than ever with the next puff of smoke from the pipe. The whole figure, in the same way, took on a look of life, like we give to unclear shapes in the clouds, and we half trick ourselves with the game of our own imagination.

If we must look very closely into the matter, we may doubt whether there was any real change, after all, in the dirty, worn out, worthless, and badly put together stuff of the scarecrow; but only a ghostly trick, and a clever effect of light and shadow so colored and planned as to fool the eyes of most men. The miracles of witchcraft seem always to have had very little cleverness; and, at least, if the above explanation does not give the truth of the way, I can suggest no better.

“Well puffed, my pretty boy!” still called out old Mother Rigby. “Come, another good strong puff, and make it with all your strength. Puff for your life, I tell you! Puff out of the very bottom of your heart, if you have any heart, or any bottom to it! Well done, again! You sucked in that mouthful as if for the pure love of it.”

And then the witch made a sign to the scarecrow, putting so much power like a magnet into her gesture that it seemed as if it had to be obeyed, like the mysterious call of the magnet when it pulls the iron.

“Why are you hiding in the corner, lazy one?” she said. “Step forward! You have the world before you!”

Honestly, if the legend was not one that I heard while sitting on my grandmother’s knee, and which had become one of the things I believed to be true before my childish mind could think about whether it was true, I question whether I would dare to tell it now.

Following Mother Rigby’s order, and stretching its arm as if to reach her held-out hand, the figure made a step forward — more like a stumble and a jerk, however, rather than a step — then wobbled and almost lost its balance. What could the witch expect? It was nothing, after all, but a scarecrow stuck upon two sticks. But the strong-willed old woman frowned, and motioned, and threw the strength of her wish so strongly at this poor mix of rotten wood, and old, stale straw, and torn clothes, that it was forced to show itself as a man, in spite of what was really true. So it stepped into the beam of sunshine.

There it stood, poor thing that it was! — with only the thinnest clothing of human likeness about it, through which was plain the stiff, shaky, not matching, faded, torn, good-for-nothing mixed pieces of its body, ready to sink in a heap upon the floor, as if it knew it did not deserve to stand up. Shall I confess the truth? At its present point of coming to life, the scarecrow reminds me of some of the weak and failed characters, made of different kinds of parts, used for the thousandth time, and never worth using, with which romance writers (and myself, no doubt, among the rest) have so crowded the world of fiction.

But the cruel old witch began to get angry and show a little bit of her evil nature (like a snake’s head, peeking with a hiss out of her chest), at this scared behavior of the thing which she had worked hard to put together.

“Puff away, you miserable thing!” she cried, angrily. “Puff, puff, puff, you thing of straw and nothing! you rag or two! you meal bag! you pumpkin head! you nothing! Where shall I find a name bad enough to call you by? Puff, I say, and suck in your make-believe life with the smoke! or else I will grab the pipe from your mouth and throw you where that red coal came from.”

Being threatened so, the sad scarecrow had no choice but to puff away as fast as it could. As needed, therefore, it smoked the pipe eagerly, and sent out so many puffs of tobacco smoke that the small cottage kitchen became full of smoke. The one sunbeam tried to come through in a misty way, and could only faintly show the shape of the cracked and dusty window pane on the opposite wall. Mother Rigby, meanwhile, with one brown arm on her hip and the other stretched towards the figure, stood with a hard look in the darkness with the same way of standing and look as when she used to put a heavy nightmare on her victims and stand by the bed to enjoy their pain.

In fear and trembling, this poor scarecrow puffed. But its efforts, it must be admitted, did a lot of good; for, with each new puff, the figure lost more and more of its dizzy and confusing thinness and seemed to become more solid. Its very clothes, moreover, shared in the magical change, and shone with the shine of newness and sparkled with the skillfully sewn gold that had long ago been torn away. And, half seen in the smoke, a yellow face turned its dull eyes on Mother Rigby.

At last the old witch made a tight fist and shook it at the figure. Not that she was truly angry, but only acting on the rule — perhaps not true, or not the only truth, though as high a one as Mother Rigby could be expected to reach — that weak and sleepy people, being unable to get better inspiration, must be stirred up by fear. But here was the hard moment. If she failed in what she now tried to do, it was her cruel plan to break the poor figure into its first parts.

“You have a man’s look,” said she, in a hard voice. “Have also the echo and copy of a voice! I tell you to speak!”

The scarecrow gasped, struggled, and at last made a low sound, which was so mixed with its smoky breath that you could hardly tell whether it was really a voice or only a puff of tobacco. Some tellers of this story think that Mother Rigby’s spells and the strength of her will had forced a servant spirit into the body, and that the voice was his.

“Mother,” said the poor, weak voice, “do not be so hard on me! I would gladly speak; but having no sense, what can I say?”

“Can you speak, darling, can you?” cried Mother Rigby, turning her hard face into a smile. “And what will you say, indeed! Say, indeed! Are you one of the empty-headed group, and do you ask me what you should say? You will say a thousand things, and saying them a thousand times over, you will still have said nothing! Do not be afraid, I tell you! When you come into the world (where I plan to send you right away) you will not lack what you need to talk. Talk! Why, you will babble like a mill-stream, if you want. You have brains enough for that, I think!”

“I am ready to help, mother,” said the person.

“And that was well said, my pretty one,” answered Mother Rigby. “Then you speak like yourself, and meant nothing. You will have a hundred such phrases, and five hundred more too. And now, darling, I have worked so hard on you and you are so beautiful, that, truly, I love you better than any witch’s puppet in the world; and I’ve made them of all kinds — clay, wax, straw, sticks, night fog, morning mist, sea foam, and chimney smoke. But you are the very best. So listen to what I say.”

“Yes, kind mother,” said the person, “very happily!”

“With all your heart!” said the old witch, putting her hands on her sides and laughing loudly. “You have such a pretty way of speaking. With all your heart! And you put your hand to the left side of your vest as if you really had one!”

So now, in a very good mood with this strange invention of hers, Mother Rigby told the scarecrow that it must go and play its part in the great world, where, she said, not one man in a hundred had more real substance than itself. And, so that he could hold up his head with the best of them, she gave him, at once, an uncountable amount of wealth. It was made partly of a gold mine in Eldorado, and of ten thousand shares in a burst bubble, and of half a million acres of grape farm at the North Pole, and of a castle in the air, and a castle in Spain, together with all the rents and income coming from them.

She also gave him the load of a certain ship, filled with salt from Cadiz, which she herself, by her magic, had caused to sink, ten years before, in the deepest part of the middle of the ocean. If the salt was not melted away, and could be taken to market, it would bring a good price from the fishermen. So he would not be without cash, she gave him a small copper coin made in Birmingham, which was all the money she had with her, and also a lot of brass, which she put on his forehead, and this made it more yellow than ever.

“With that money alone,” said Mother Rigby, “you can pay for what you need all over the world. Kiss me, pretty darling! I have done my best for you.”

Also, so the adventurer would not miss any possible help for a fair start in life, this good old woman gave him a password by which he was to introduce himself to a certain judge, council member, merchant, and church elder (these four roles were all in one man), who was the leader of society in the nearby big city. The password was only a single word, which Mother Rigby whispered to the scarecrow, and which the scarecrow was to whisper to the merchant.

“Even though the old man is stiff and sore, he will run your errands for you, once you have whispered that word in his ear,” said the old witch. “Mother Rigby knows the good Judge Gookin, and the good Judge knows Mother Rigby!”

Here the witch pushed her wrinkled face close to the puppet’s, chuckling without stopping, and fidgeting all through her body, with joy at the idea which she meant to tell.

“The good Master Gookin,” she whispered, “has a pretty daughter. And listen, my dear! You have a good outside, and you are smart enough yourself. Yes, smart enough! You will think better of it when you have seen more of how smart other people are. Now, with your outside and your inside, you are the very man to win a young girl’s heart. Never doubt it! I tell you it will be so. Just be bold about it, sigh, smile, wave your hat, stretch out your leg like a dance teacher, put your right hand to the left side of your vest, and pretty Polly Gookin is yours!”

All this time the new creature had been breathing in and breathing out the smoky smell of his pipe, and now seemed to keep doing this as much for the pleasure it gave as because it was a basic need for his life. It was wonderful to see how very much like a human being it acted. Its eyes (for it seemed to have a pair) were fixed on Mother Rigby, and at the right times it nodded or shook its head. It did not lack words right for the occasion: “Really! Indeed! Please tell me! Is it possible! Truly! No, not at all! Oh! Ah! Hem!” and other such serious words that show attention, questions, agreement, or disagreement on the part of the listener.

Even if you stood by and saw the scarecrow made, you could hardly stop yourself from believing that it fully understood the clever advice which the old witch poured into its fake ear. The more seriously it put its lips to the pipe, the more clearly it looked human among real things, the smarter its face looked, the more lifelike its movements and actions, and the easier it was to hear and understand its voice. Its clothes, too, shone much brighter with a grand look that was not real. Even the pipe, which held the spell of all this magic, stopped looking like a smoke-blackened clay stump, and became a fine white pipe, with a painted bowl and an amber mouthpiece.

It might be feared, however, that as the life of the pretend thing seemed the same as the smoke of the pipe, it would end when the tobacco turned to ashes. But the old woman saw the problem coming.

“Hold the pipe, my dear one,” she said, “while I fill it for you again.”