New-England legends
page: (TitlePage) [View Page (TitlePage) ]NEW-ENGLAND LEGENDS. BY HARRIET PRESCOTT SPOFFORD. WITH, ILLUSTRATIONS. BOSTON: JAMES R. OSGOOD AND COMPANY, (LATE TICNOR & FIELDS, AND FIELDS, OSGOOD, & Co.) 1871. page: [View Page ] Entered, according to Act of Congress, in the year 1871, BY HARRIET PRESCOTT SPOFFORD, In the Office of the Librarian of Congress, at Washington. RAND, AVERY, & FRYE, rirljCRIs, 8 CORNHLL, BOSTON: THE following hastily-prepared sketches, originally published in less permanent form, are collected at the request of indulgent readers, and offered with all due apology for their incom- pleteness. H. P. S. NEWBURYORT, MASS., Aug. x, x871. page: (Table of Contents) [View Page (Table of Contents) ] CONTENTS. THE TaBu ACCOUNT OF CAPTIN KD . . . . CA2LESTOWN . 8 SALEM ' . . . . . . . . . 1 NBWBUPOT . . . . .24 DOVER . . . . a . . 29 POBTaSMouT .. 4 . . . . 36 page: (List of Illustrations) [View Page (List of Illustrations) ] ILLUSTRATIONS. KIDD KILLS WILLIAM MOORE . . . . . . . . . ESCAPE OF THE MYSTERIOUS LADY FROM THE URSULINE CONVENT ON MT. BENEDICT . " RUINS OF THE URSULINE CONVENT i . . . .. 13 REV. GEORGE BURROUGHS ACCUSED OF WITCHCRAFT . . 17 CAPT. BOARDMAN ORDERS THE BRITISH FLAG TO. BE STRUCK . . 25 GRAND-DAUGHTER OF MAJOR WALD3ON ALONE IN'THE WOODS . . . 33 FRANCES DEERING MAKING SIGNAL . . . . . 37 page: [View Page ] THE TRUE' ACCOUNT OF CAPTAIN. KIDD. THE islands about the harbors of all our New England rivers are so wild, and would seem to have offered so many advantages, that they have always been supposed, by the ruder popu- ladon, to be the hiding-place of piratical treas- ures, and particularly of Captain Kidd's and the secretion, among rocks and sands, of chests of jewels stripped from noble Spantis ladies who have walked the awful plank, wit! shot- bags full of diamonds, and ingots of pure gold, Is one of the tenets of the vulgar faith. This belief has ranged up and down the whole shore with more freedom than the pirates ever did, and the legends on the subject are legion -from the old Frenchman of Passamaquoddy Bay to the wild stories of the Jersey and Caro- lina sandbars too countless for memory, the Fireship off Newport, the Shrieking Woman of Marblehead, and the Lynn Mariner who, while burying his treasure in a cave, was sealed up alive by a thunderbolt that cleft the rock, and whom some one, under spiritual insp ration, spent lately a dozen years in vain endeavor to unearth. The parties that have equipped them- selves with hazel-rods and spades, antd pro- ceeded, at the dead of night, in search Of these riches, without turning their heads or uttering the Divine Name, and, digging till they struck metal, have met with all manner of ghostly ap- pearances, from the little naked negro sitting and crying on the edge of the hogsLead of doubloons, to the ball of fire sailing stra' ght up the creek, till it hangs trembling on tae tide Just opposite the excavation into wilch it shoots with the speed of lightning, so ;errify- ing and bewildering the treaaure-seeke-s that when all is over they fail to find again the place of their late labor-the parties that have met with these adventures would, perhaps, cease to waste much more of their time in such'porsult8 in this part of the country if they knew that Captain Kidd had never landed north of Block Island until, with fatal temerity, he brought his vessel into Boston, and that every penny of his gains was kn6wn and was accounted for, while as to Bradlsh, Tew, and the rest of that gentry, they wasted everything as they went in riotous living, and could never have had a dol-. lar to hide, and no disposition to hide it if they had; and whatever they did possess they took with them when, quietly abandoning their ships to the officers of the lawt they went ip thee creeks and rivers in boats, and dispersed them- selves throughout the country. Ever since the time of Jason there have been sea-robbers, and at one period they so infested, the Mediterranean-owning a thousand galleys and four hundred cities, it is said-that Pompey was Eent out with a fleet and a fore of soldiery to extirpate them. In later times there were tribes of lawless men associated together in hunting the cattle of the West Indlan islands, curing the flesh, and exchanging it in adjacent. settlements; they held all property in common, and were called Buccaneers, lfom the word "boucan," a Carib term for preserved meat. By the mistaken policy of the viceroys of the islands, who, in order to reduce them to less lawless lives, exterminated all the cattle, these men were driven to the sea, and became In time the celebrated freebooters, or "Brethren of the Coast t The bull of Pope Alexander VI., by authority of which Spain and Portugal claimed all American discoveries, caused Eng. land, France and the'Netherlands to combine in the Western Hemisphere, whatever quarrels came to hand in the Eastern, and to ravage the common enemy-so that letters-of-marque were - constantly issued by them to all adventurers, without rpqiliring any condemnation of prizes or account of proceedings, by which means these countries virtually created ;a system of piracy, and Sir Francis Drake's sack of St. Do- mingo, and the subsequent pillage'of Pernam- buco, were in nowise different from the ex- ploits of the brutal Olonois, Van Horn, and Brodely, upon the opulent Spanish cities of the Main. As the trade with the East and West In* dies increased, these freebooters ceased to sail under any color but their own, the black flag; no longer left their ships to march through tropical swamps and forests, to float on rafts down rivers of a hundred cataracts, to scale mountalns, and fall, as if out of the clouds, on the devoted cities of the Isthmus of Darlen, the silver, and gold of whose cathedrals, palaces and treasure-houses were worth the labor ; nor did they confine themselves on sea to overhaul. ing the Spanish galleon sitting deep in' the war ; ter with her lading from the Mexican and Peru vian mines; but they made their attacks on the great slow ship of the AsiatiC waters, and when their suppression became vital to com- meroe, and all powers united: against them, page: 2-3[View Page 2-3] they possessed themselves of sumptuous re- treats In Mradgascar and the Indian Ocean, where they had their seraglios, and lived in fabulous splendor and luxury. As this race, hunted oi sea and enervated on land, died out, their place was taken by others, and expedi- tions came gradually to be fitted out from the colonies of New Eng)and, while Virgina, the Carolinas, and even the Quakers of Philadel- phia, aflorled them a market for their rob- beries. When these also in their time aban- doned their profession, they made their homes, some in the Carolinas, some in Rhode Island, and some on the south shore of Long Island, where their descendants are among the most respectable of the community. To none of these did Captain Kidd belong; and, previous to the last two years of his life, he was esteemed a good, citizen, and as honest a sea-captain as ever sailed out of New York, to which place he belonged, and where, in the Surrogate's office, is still preserved his marriage certificate, that classifies him as Gentleman. During the war with France he had been mas- ter of a ship in the neighborhood of the Carib- bean Sea, and had valiantly come to the assist- ance of a British man-of-war, and the two together had vanquished a fleet of six French frigates; it was testified upon his trial that he had been a mighty man in the West Indies, and that he had refused to go a pirateering, upon which his men had seized his ship; and it was on account of his public services there that the General Assembly of New York had paid him a bounty of one hundred and fifty pounds-a great sum in those days; and the probability is, that, being made a bone of contention be- tween political parties, exactly what he was applauded for doing at one time he was hung for doing at another. The American seas being greatly troubled by pirates, early In 1695 the King summoned the Earl of Bellomont before him, and told him that, having come to the determination to put an end to the increasing piratical tendencies of his colonies, he had chosen him as the most suitable person to be invested with the govern- ment of New York and New England. The earl at once set about devising the readiest means for the execution of the King's purpose, and Robert Livingston, chancing then to be in London, and being acquainted with the earl, Introduced to him William Kidd, who, having left his wif e and children in New York, was also then in London, as a person who had se- cured some fame in en agements with the French, a man of honor and intrepidity, and one who, knowing the haunts of the pirates, was very fit to command the expedition against them which Bellomont and others were plan- ning. Livingston became Kidd's surety, a kindness that the latter always remembered, as he threatened, on his return two years afterward, to sell his sloop, and indemnify Livingston out of the proceeds, if Bellomont did not surrender the bond. It was at first proposed that Kidd should have a British frigate, but hardly daring to give him that--:which hesitation in Itself Indi- cates h6w far the great lords were really impli- cated in his transactions--a ship was purchased for six thousand pounds, Kidd and Livingston* being at one-fifth of the expense, and the rest being borne by the Earls of Bellomont and Bomney, the Lord Chancellor Somers, the Lord, High Admiral, the Duke of Shrewsbury, and Sir Edward Harrison, ana they agreed to give the King, who entered into it very heartily, a tenth of the profits of the affair. Kidd was somewhat averse to the plan, and seriously de. murred, it is believed, but was threatened by the men of power that his own ship should be detained and taken from him if he persisted, and accordingly he yielded, and in 1696 was regularly commissioned under two separate parchments, one to cruise against the French, and the other-an extraordinary one, but issued under the Great Seal, empowering him to pro- ceed against the pirates of the American seas, and really given for the purpose of authorizing him to dispose of such property as he might capture. He had orders to render his accounts to the Earl of Bellomont, remotely and securely in New England; and the Adventure Galley, a private armed ship of thirty guns and eighty men, was brought to the buoy in the Nore at the latter end of February, and on the 23d of April, 1696, he sailed in her from Plymouth, reaching New York in July, and bringing in a French ship, valued at three hundred and fifty pounds, which he had taken on the passage, and which he there condemned. In New York he Invited men to enter his ser- vice, by notices posted in the streets. and pre- senting large offers of booty after forty shares for himself and the ship should be deducted; and increasing his crew to more than one hun- dred and fifty men, he went to Madeira, then to several of the West Indian ports, and after- ward to Madagascar, the coast of Malabar, and to Bab's Key, an island at the entrance of the Red Sea, where he lay in walt for the Mocha fleet, then preparing to sail. It is evident that he went outside of his nominal Instructions by 'thus leaving the American for the Asiatic wa- ters ; but it is also evident that he understood he was to be supported by the people of'power who were behind him at home, and believed himself to be only following out their inten- tions; and the man who had been encouraged to rob one ship had not, perhaps, sufficleht re- finement of discrimination to think any differ- ent matter of robbing another. Moreover, having come across and captured no vessel since leaving New York, he might naturally have felt that his owners were expecting more of him, and thus have resolved on something desperate. At any rate he did not consider himself to be going outside of his duty, or to be appearing in any queetionable light, when, on his voyage out, he met the ship carrying the ambassador to the Great Mogul, and exchanged courtesies therewith. Tired out with his want of success, when an- chored at Bab's Key, he sent boats to bring the first news of the sailing of the Mocha fleet, es- tablished a lookout on the hills of the island, and told his men that no6w he would freight the Adventure Galley with gold and silver when the fleet came out, though it was found that many of its ships belonged to friendly nations, and it was convoyed by an English and a Dutch man-of-war. Kidd, however, sailed into the midst of the fleet, which fired at him first. and returning the fire with one or two ineffectual shots, he. hauled off and left it to pursue its course Sailing then for the coast of Malabar, a couple of months afterward Kidd took a Moor. ish vessel belonging* to Aden, but commanded by an Englishman, and f4nding but little ot - \ \ \\ \ -\- "KIDD SNATCHED UP AN IRON-BOUND BUCKET AND SRUCK WILLIAM MOORE A BLOW ON THE HEAD, OF WHCH HE DIED NEXT DAY." value in the prize, he had her men hoisted by the arms and beaten with the flat of a cutlass to make them reveal what they had done with their money-a punishment which, whether se- vere or not for that semi-barbarous era, was, with two exceptions, the only act of personal cruelty of which he was ever accused; and peo- ple whom, if the general idea of him we-e true, he would have dispatched with a bulet, he simply kept in the hold till, inquiry for them being over, he dismissed them. He obtained from th vessel some coffee, pepper, and Ara- blan gold, and some myrrh, with which the ex- travagant rogue pitched his ship. Going further out to sea again, he next encountered a Portu- guese man-of-war, but after a brief engagement withdrew with ten men wounded, and returned presently to the coast of Malabar. Here, his cooper having been kfiled by the natives, he "served them in pretty much the same way," says one writer, "as the officers of oar late South Sea Exploring Expedition served the Fijians, burning their houses and shooting one of the murderers.' This, however, was one of the other instances of cruelty to which refer- ence has Just been made, the murderer being bound to a treek and shot at in turn by all the retaliators. Shortly after this, Captain Kidd fell in with the ship Royal Captain, which he visited, and whose officers lie entertained on board the Adventure Galley; but some of her crew having told that there were Greeks and others on board with much wealth of precious stones, the piratical spirit of his men led to page: 4-5[View Page 4-5] mutinous desires and expressions; and, in a rage with those who had wished to board and rob the Royal Captain, Kidd snatched up an iron-bound bucket, and struck William Moore, the gunner and chief grumbler, a blow on the head, 'of which he died next day. Kidd re- marked to his surgeon that the death of the gunner did not trouble him so much as other passages of his voyage, as he had friends in England who could easily bring him off for that; and he himself had it urged as a virtuous act rather than otherwise, since done to pre- vent both piracy and mutiny. Still on the coast of Maloar, in November he ran across another Moorish vessel, and artfully hoisted the French colors, upon which the Moor did the same. "By --- have I catched you?" he cried; "you are a free prize to England!" and making easy conquest of her, he. caused one Le Roy, a French passenger, to act the part of master, and to show a pretended French pass upon which he declared her formally a prize to England, as if observing again the pre- scribed forms, and intending to claim for his conduct, should he ever need to do so, the pro- tection of the commission authorizing him to take French ships. In the course of the next month, December, he captured a Moorish ketch of fifty tons, and turned her adrift; took about four hundred pounds' worth from a Portuguese, and sunk her near Calcutta; and then made prize of an Armenian vessel of four hundred tons, called the Quedagh Merchant, andsomle- times the Scuddee, and commanded by an Englistman-the entire value of the latter cap- ture being sixty-four thousand pounds, of which Kidd's share was about sixteen thousand. Kidd then went to Madagascar, where, having ex- changed all the equipments of the Adventure Galley for dust and bar gold and silver, silks, gold-cloth, precious stones,' and spices, he burned that ship, which was leaking badly, and took to the Quedagh Merchant, refusing a ran. som of thirty thousand rupees which the Arme- nians came, crying and wringing their hands, to offer him. Here, too, he is said to have met with one of the East India Company's ships, Captain Culliford, turned pirate. It was clearly his duty; under his commission, to offer battle at once; but, instead of anything of the kind, it was testified on the trial that when the pi- rates,- with bated breath, sent out a boat to in- quire concerning his intentions, he drank with them, in a kind of lemonade called " bomboo," damnation to his own'soul if he ever harmed them, and exchanged gifts with Culllford, re- ceiving some silk and four hundred pounds in return for some heavy ordnance. Kidd denied that he had. ever been aboard of Culliford, and declared that, when he proposed to attack him, his men said. they would rather fire two shots into him than one into Culliford; that they stole his journal, broke open his chest and rifled It, plundered his ammunition, and threatened his life so that he was obliged to barricade him- self in his cabin-his statement being borne out in some degree by the fact that here ninety-five of his men deserted to Captain Culliford, as if their own master were not sufficiently piratical, whereupon, recruiting a handful of men, he sailed immediately for the West Indies. He de- clared further that he did not go on board the Quedagh Merchant until after the desertion of these men, which left only about a dozen in his crew-not enough to keep his leaking craft from sinking. But the capture of the Quedagh Merchant had been reported home by the East India Company, and directions had been issued to all the Ame- rican governors and viceroys to seize him wherever he should appear. At Anguilla he ,learned that he had been officially proclaimed a pirate, and failing to obtain any provisions either there or at St. Thomas, at which latter place be was not even allowed to land, he went to Curagoa, from whence intelligence of his whereabouts was forwarded to England, and the man-of-war Queensborough was sent In pur. suit of him. Kidd was aware that he had been upon a hazardous enterprise, so far as the risks at home were considered, to say nothing of the risks at sea; and whether he was conscious that he had exceeded his instructions, too eagerly -misinterpreting them, or whether he knew that it is a way with the great to sacrifice those who compromise them too serrously, he prepared himself for any. fortune: he deter- mined to go to New York, and prove for him- self what protection and countenance he now had to expect from Bellomont and the others; but he also determined to venture as little as possible, and he accordingly bought the sloop Antonia-though excusing this afterward to the earl by saying that his men, frightened by the proclamation, had wished to .un the ship ashore, and so many of them left him that again he had not enough to handle the ropes, which must have been untrue--loaded her with his silks, muslins, jewels, bullion and gold-dust (the rest of his booty, consisting of bales of coarse goods, sugar, iron, rice, wax, opium, saltpetre and anchors, he. left in the Quedagh Merchant, moored on the south side of Hispa- niola, with twenty guns in the hold and thirty mounted, and twenty men, with his mate in command)-and sailed in her for New York; intlfmating, by his action, a doubt of his ret ception, though that might well be accounted for by a knowledge of the King's proclamation, 'but Just as plainly intimating that he had reason to rely on the promises of Bellomont and the rest of that royal stock company in piracy. Meanwhile Bellomont had been delayed from entering upon his official life by one thing and another, until two years had elapsed from the time of Kidd's departure from England. On arriving in New York, he heard of the rumoredl career which Kidd was running, and presently the news having reached England, and an ac- count of the piublic sentiment about it there being returned to him, Bellomont felt that very active measures were necessary in order to ex- culpate himself, the Ministry and the King from the popular accusation of participating in Kidd's robberies, and took every step necessary for his apprehension. Needing some repairs before reaching his destination, Kidd very cautiously put into Dela. wares Bay, where he landed a chest belonging to one Gillam, an indubitable pirate, who had been a Mohammedan, and who now returned, a passenger 'from Madagascar. The news spreading up the coast, an armed sloop went after Kidd, but failed to find him. and he reached the eastern end of. Long island with- out being overhauled. Entering the Sound, he dispatched a letter to Bellomont, and trom Oyster Bay sent loving greeting to his family, and a lawyer, by the name of Emot, came down from New York and went .on board the An- tonia. Learning that the Earl of Bellomont was in Boston, Kidd altered his course for Rhode Island, and, arriving there, sent Mr. Emot to. Boston to secure a promise of safety from Bellomont if he should land; a promise granted on condition of its proving tLat Emot told the truth-he having asserted that Kidd's men locked him up while they committed pi- racies. Kidd then went to Block Island, and wrote to Bellomont again, protesting lis Inno- cence, urging the care he had taker- of the owner's interests, and sending Lady Bellomont a present of jewels of the value of sixty pounds, which Bellomont had her keep lest she should offend the giver and prevent tt e devel. opments that he desired, though afterward surrendering and adding them to the general in- ventory of Kidd's effects. While at Block Island he was joined by his wife and childrer, under the care of a Mr. Clark; he then gratefully went out of his way In order to land Mr. Clark on Gardiner's Island, as that gentleman wished to return to New York; and although Kidd him- self did not go ashore. at the latter place, he left with Mr. Gardiner a portion of his :reasure afterward abandoned to the Commissioners sent for it by the Governor. While ly1ig here three sloops from New York came down and were loaded with goods, which were, however, all recovered--Kidd maintaining, with so much paucity of invention as to resemble the truth, that it was his men and not he who shipfed them off. Meanwhile the earl sent down Dun- can Campbell, the postmaster at BstoLr, to in. vite Captain Kidd to that port, telling h m that if innocent he might afely come in, and he would intercede for his pardon; and Kidd straightway headed the Antonia for 3oston, reaching there on the 1st of July and appear- ing publicly upon the streets. Hearing of his arrival, the earl sent for him, and, reft sing to see him without witnesses, examined him be- fore the Council, directed him to draw up a nar- rative of his proceedings, and dismissed him. Bellomont, however, kept a watch upon his movements, as he both desired and neec ed his arrest, but thought It expedient to use friendly means in order to discover the exten-, of his outrages and the disposition of the property acquired through them. At the end of the week, Kidd showing no intention to unbosom ] himself in that wise, and it being feared that i he meant to make off, he was arrested and i committed to prison, though not till he had t made a valiant opposition and, had drawn his t sword upon the Kitg's offcers--the arrest t taking place near the door of the earl's lodg- I ings, into which Kidd rushed and ran toward t him, followed by the constables. His sloop, on I that, was Immediately appraised, Its contents t taken possession of by certain Commissioners appointed for that purpose, his papers, cntain- v ing-accounts of his buried treasure and of that E in Mr. Gardiner7s hands. were opened, and all h the property was finally delivered to the earl , with an inventory of one thousand one hun- a dred and eleven ounces of gold, two tho sand to three hundred and fifty-three ounces of silver, p three-score Jewels, and bags, bales and pieces cl of goods' about as valuable as the precious R metals. Mrs. Kild's property, which inc uded w several pieces of plate, nearly three hundred lo dollars of her own and twenty-lve crowns of st mn her maid's, was taken out of her temporary n- lodgings in the house of Duncan Campbellt at nt the time when search was made for a bag of or gold-dust and ingots of the value of a thousand ,r. pounds, that Kidd had Intended for a gift to ty Lady Bellomont, and that was found between se two sea-beds; but on petition the Governor ot and Council restored to Mrs. Kidd her own. I's His wife-to whom he had been but a few i- years married-accompanying him with her d children, her maid and ah that she possessed, o- shows that Kidd had no intention of being sur- ie prised and overmastered i; but on the contrary, at if worse came to worst, that he had meant to y. take her back to the Quedagh Merchant and e find a home in some place beyond the pale of 1- British justice; while retaining her affection, d and caring to retain it, is in itself a sort of i- testimony that he was hardly so black as he d has been painted. Ten days after his arrest Tr news came that the mate of the Quedagh Mer- it chant, left in command, had taken out her n cargo, removed it to Curagoa, and had then o set her on fire, and the mariner who brought' i- ,the intelligence had seen her burning, That e was a dark day, doubtless, to Captain Kidd, e but not so dark as others yet to come. s A ship-of-war had now been dispatched i from England to take Captain Kidd over there, dbut being delayed by inclement weather, and , putting back in a storm after he was on board, h by the time it arrived in the Thames all Eng- , land was in a state of excitement over his I alleged partnership with several of the Minis- - ters, and their apparent determination not to * bring him to justice; and from'a common t malefactor he became the lofty subject of a a state trial. I On his arrival the House. of Commons ad- dressed the King, asking to have Kidd's trial * postponed until the next Parliament, that there might be time- for the transmission of all the existing documents having any relation to his - affairs; and he was accordingly confined in Newgate until the next year, when the papers were laid before the House, together with a i. petition from Cogi Baba, on behalf of himself and other Armenians, subjects of the King of Persia, setting for'h all the facts of the Quedagh Merchant's capture, and praying for. Kidd's examination and their own relief. Cogi Baba was ordered before the House, and Kidd himself was produced at the bar, and afterward remanded to prison. A motion was then made in the House to declare void .the grant made to the Earl of Bellomont and others of all the treas. ure taken by Kidd, but it was negatived, and the House of Commons then requested the King to have Kidd proceeded against according to law, and he was brought to trial at the Old Bailey, in 1701, for murder and piracy upon the high seas. - At the same time, the House of Commons was proceeding upon an impeachment of the Earl of Oxford and Lord Somers, for certain high crimes and misdemeanors; one of which was their connection with -Kdd, and their agency in passing the commissions and grant to him, as prejudicial to public service and private trade, and dishonorable to the King, contra!ry to the law of England and to the Bill of Rights. It was urged in reply that a pirate was hostis human-i generis, and his goods be- longed to whomsoever it might be that ae- stroyed him, and the King granted title'only to page: 6-7[View Page 6-7] that for which no owner was to be found. Be- fore tne lords were acquitted Bellomont was dead, and Kidd was hung; while popular feel- ing ran high, parties took sides in the affair ; there were accusations afloat that these lords, now on their own trial, had set the Great Seal of England to the pardon of the arch-pirate; and as the anti-Ministerial side was determined to hang Kidd ini order to prove the complicity and gmult of the Ministers with him, the Minis- ters themselves were, of course, determined to hang him to prove their own innocence. Kidd made a very good appearance upon his trial, ignorant as he was of all the forms of law; he insisted on his innocence, and that he had only captured ships with French passes or sailing under th- French flag, and he fought manfully, but to no purpose., Of the men that were. tried with him, several plead that they surrendered themselves upon a certain procla- mation of the King's pardon, but the Court de- cidea that, not having surrendered themselves to the designated peisons; they did not come within its provisions, and they must swing for it, andro they did. A couple of servants were- acquitted ; but to Kidd himself no mercy was shown. Justice Turton, ir. Newton, Advocate for the Admiralty, and the Lord Chief Baron, all made elaborate arguments against him, while no one spoke for him; and all his pre- vious plunderings were allowed to be cited in the Court, in order to prove that he plundered the Quedagh Merchant. When he desired to have counsel assigned him, Sir SalathielLovell, the Recorder, wonderingly asks him, "Wlat would you 'have counsel for?"And Dr. Ox- enden contemptuously inquires, ("What matter of law can you have?"But as Kidd quietly answers, 4 Tilere be matters of law, my lord," the Recorder asks again, "Mr. Kidd, do you know what you mean by matters of law?" Whereupon Kidd replies as quietly as before, "I know what I mean ; I desire to put off my trial as long as I can, till I can get my evi- dence ready." He has had but a fortnight's notice of his trial, and knowing how important a delay would be to him in which the popular feeling might die out or abate, fe urges, "I beg your lordships' patience till I can procure my papers. I had a couple of French passes, which I must make use of to my justification," and presently adds, "I beg your lordships I may have counsel admitted, and that my trial may be put off; I am not really prepared for it." To which the Recorder rudely replies, "Nor never will, if you can help it." Kidd still contended for counsel, and at last ltwas assigned to him. It thenappeared that he had already petitioned for money to carry on his trial, and though it had, as a matter of course, been granted to him, as to any prisoner, it had been put into his hands only on the night be- fore. His counsel, for whose services he had so exerted himself, made one or two timid re- marks, but, after the jury were sworn, although the Solicitor-General plied the witnesses with leading questions, the cowardly lawyers never cross-examined, made any plea, or opened their lips. The indictment for murder, upon which Kidd was first tried, portrayed, with great particu- larity, the blow struck the gunner, saying that of that mortal bruise "the aforesaid William Moore, from' the thirtieth day of October *r * until the one-and-thirtieth day * * * did languish, and languishing did live," but on the one-and-thirtieth day did die, and declaring that. William Kidd feloniously, voluntarily and of malice aforethought did kill and murder himi to all of which Kidd plead not guilty, constantly interrupting the Court wigh his exclamations and explanations. 4 The passes were seized by my Lord Bellomonte; tiat we will prove as clear as the day!" cries he. When invited to find cause for exception in the jury, he either adroitly or ingenuously answers, "I shall chal- lenge none; I know nothing to the contrary but they are honest men." The time coming for his defense, he told in an earnest manner a short and simple story, but one in which, by comparison of the various witnesses, several discrepancies with the truth were found. t"My lord," said he, "I will tell you what the case was. I was coming up within a league of the Dutchman, and some of my men were making a mutiny about taking her, and my gunner told the people he could put the captain in a way to take the ship and be safe. Says I, C How will you do that?' The gunner answered, ' We will get the captain and men aboard.' & And what then I' I We will go aboard the ship and plun. der her, and we will have it under their hands that we did not take her.'. Says I, eThis is Judas-like. I dare not do such a thing.' Says he, I We may do it, we are beggars already.' ' Why,' says I, ' may we take this -ship because we are poor?I Upon that a mutiny arose, so I took up a bucket and just throwed it at him, and said, 6 You are a rogue to make such a mo- tion.' This I can prove, my lord." But he did not prove it, and though he strug. gled hard to do so, and though his faithful servant Richard Barlicotn, also on trial for his life, must have committed a hundred perjuries in his behalf, the Court could not find evidence of any mutiny for more than a montii before the runner's death, and decided that William Moore's outcry that Kidd had brought him and many others to ruin was not sufficient provoca. tion for the killing. And though Kidd plead that striking the man in a passiol, with so rude and unpremeditated a weapon as the first slush- bucket at hand, if not justifiable as a prevent- ive oi mutiny, was, at furtlhest, no more than manslaughter, and exclaimed that t" it was not designedly done, but in his passion, for which he was heartily sorry," yet, it being deter- mined to hang him at all odds, the lawyers were given hints, the witnesses were brow- beaten, and the jury were instructed, after tedious iteration, to bring him in guilty; which was done. At the trial next day on the indictments for piracy, Kidd did not lose heart. There were but two important witnesses produced against him, Palmer, one of his crew, and his ship's surgeon, Bradlnham, who, though both of them sharers in his adventures, had become evi- dence for the Crown on the promise of their own safety. Kidd himself cross-questioned them, but idly, their replies being always straightforward and consistent. His only de- fense was that he had taken French passes from every capture, that the Earl of Bellomont had seized them, and that his men, once catching sight of a French pass when a ship was over- hauled. would not let that ship go, and for the rest answered with indifference, "That is what these witnesses say," as if such depraved testi- mony could really be worth nothing. ' Did you hear me say so!" he demanded of Palmer once. i' I heard you say so," was the reply. "I am sure," said Kidd then, Contemptuously, "you never heard me say such a word to such a log- gerhead as you." But matters going beyond his patience soon, "Hear me!" he cried indig- nantly, but was silenced by the Court, only, to 9 break out again presently on Palmer with, "Certainly you have not the impudence to say that " and to adjure him to "speak true." By-and-by the question of one of the passes be- ing up, "Palmer, did you see that pass?" he eagerly aeks ; and, the old subordinate manner returning to the other man, he answers In- deed, captain, I did not;" whereupon, like one who throws up his hands in despair, Kiad ex- claims, What boots It to ask him an ques. tions? We have no witnesses, and what we say signifies nothing." With Bradinham. he is less contemptuous and more ewazed, f This man' contradicts himself in a hundred places i" he declared. 4 He tells a thousand lies * * * There was no such thing in November he knows no more of these things than you do. This fellow used to sleep five or six montas to- gether in the hold! * It is hard," he ex- claims after awhile, "that a couple of rascals should take away the King's subjects' IUves. Because I did not turn pirate, you rogues, you would make me one!"And, with that, hope Blips faster and faster away from his'grasp, and when the Solicitor-General would know if he has anything further to ask of the witnesses, he replies "No, no! So long as he swears i, our words or oaths cannot be taken. No, no," he continues, wearily, "it signifies nothing." But he does ask at last one other question. "Mr. Bradinham," he cries, bitterly, "are not yoa promised your life to take away mine?" and a little .later he adds, with dignity, "I will not trouble the Court any more, for it is a folly," and when the final word of the Judge has been uttered, that he shall be taken thence to his execution, he says, "My lord, it is a very hard sentence. For my part, I am the innocentest person of them all, only I have been sworn against by perjured persons." The feeling against Kidd. though, was hardly satisfied even by his death; and fearful lest they ihad lost a victim, after all, the public cir- culated stories of his escape, and of the hanging of a man of straw in his place, although if the "blunt monster with uncounted heads" had taken the trouble to use one of those heads, the al s:m'd tj- (f i he rumor might have been evident; for Kidd's evil fortune pursued hinmeven from the scaffold,' and the rope breaki ig, doubled and piolonge1 the last awful moments, and between the first hanging and the final one he was heard to have conversation with the executioner, ere passing to that Bar where he was judged, let us hope, after a different fashion. But the death of Captain Kidd put an end to piracy in the American and most other seas; and, in the meantime, so far from lying con- cealed to enrich the poor treasure-seekers of our coasts, all the gains of Captain Kidd, ill- gotten at the best, have gone to swell the reve. nues of the English Kingdol. page: 8-9[View Page 8-9] CHARBLESTOWN. THE traveler who seeks the cool northeast seaside is scarcely aware how near It is to him when, after his wearisome Journey, he crosses the narrow and crooked streets which are Bos- ton's crown of picturesque glory, and leaves the city by the Eastern Rallway. For no sooner has the train moved out of the station than the eea-views begin to open on him as he goes- vistas of the broad, blue bay; streams just emptying in . salt marshes, rich with every tint and every odor; the bold bluffs of Nahant; the long lines and lonely houses of the Chelsea beaches; forts far away in the harbor, where the flag waves like a blossom on its reed; and town after town, all more or less historic, and all full of the wild sea-breath that gives such a bloom to the faces of their women, and such a vigor to their men. He has hardly crossed the first bri1ge before one of these towns rises on his sight, sitting on her hill the while as fair as any pictured city of walls and towers, and over. looking the Mystic and the Charles, and the wide and windy bay. Indeed, a lovelier view of any town I do not know than Charlestown, when seen from the car window, her lights re- flected in the water at her feet, and her streets lifted in tier over tier, till the loftypspire of the hill-top church glitters In the moon or starlight far above them all It is not so charming a spot, however, upon nearer acquaintance, for most of its streets are as narrow as those of the neighboring metropo- lis, and not one-half so clean, and it is more in- teresting as a congregation of workshops, foundries, and great industrial establishments, than in any other light; for, owing to the cir- cumstance of five towns having been set off from it, and a part of four others, It has now the smallest territory of any town in the State of Massachusetts, nd 'is necessarily crowded. Running along the waterside is the Navy Yard, surrounded by a massive granite wall, ten feet high, and encircling the barracks both for ma- rines and officers and their families, together With the great machine-shops, ropewalks, ship- yards, wharves, dry-docks, and other Govern- ment works on a vast scale, thronged with two thousand busy artisans and all guarded by sen- tries pacing their perpetual round, and by the receiving-ship Ohio, anchored in the stream beyond. This whole agglomeration of men and trades forms a'strong political element in its locality, and a prominent and potential member of Congress has been heard to declare that he once staid six weeks in Washington after the session in order to secure the appoint- ment of a common painter in the Navy Yard, and failed at last[ The State Prison, another lion of the place, Is. a machine hardly less powerful, as any one might easily imagine who saw it entrenched behind its perpendicular fortifications and rows of spikes, and thought of the number of of- ficials necessary to carry on its operations and maintain order among its unhappy denizens. It Is a gloomy-looking fabric, like all the tra ditional prisons 4 that slur the sunshine half a mile," and a satirist has mentioned the fact as characteristic of certain Inconsistencies between theory and practice common in Massachusetts, that almost the only place within her borders where a liberty-cap is displayed is at the top of her State Prison, not so glaring an Inconsist- ency, nevertheless, as It at first sight appears, since the imprisonment of criminals means the freedom of all the rest of society. In quite another portion of Charlestown stands the famous Bunker Hill Monument, making the most attractive feature of the,. town, with its gray shaft rising in perfect symmetry from the ample space at the sum- mit of a lofty and smoothly-swarded green hill. Here the statue of Warren is to be found, with various trophies of the Revolution, less interesting in themselves than are the sugges- tions of the scene-a scene that calls up one morning, almost a hundred years ago, with the unquailing farmers gathered behind. their breastworks of sod and hay, and the flashing bayonets and scarlet lines of British grenadiers moving up the hill, while the town below was blazing in a conflagration of every dwelling there; that calls up another morning fifty years later, where trembling old hands, that, when youth and chivalry were at flood, helped to lay the corner-stone of the Republic, now in the midst of its success laid the corner-stone of this mobnument to one of its first struggles for existence, and, in the presence of the sur- vivors of that struggle, the thunders of Web- ster's eloquence were answered by the thun- ders bf the people's applause. Who is it that declares the inclosure at Bhinker Hill peculiarly typical of our national characteristics, inas- much as, being badly beaten there, we built a monument to the fact, and have never ceased boasting thereof? One thing can certainly be said in reply, that the moral effect in teach- ing the enemy how sadly in earnest the brave rebels were, and in encouraging the dispirited patriots by sight ( f raw recruits thrice break- ing the form of the invading veterans, was something inestimable 5 that rail fence stuffed with meadow-hay was not merely the breast- work of Putnam and Pres-ott, it was the first redoubt of freedom the wide world over, and from Bunker Hill began that march o' noble thought and grand action across this coitinent which is destined to overthrow all tyrannies, both of intellect and of empire, in this hemi- sphere to-day, to-morrow in the other. It gives one a very satisfactory emoltion of -patriotism to stand on Bunker Hill, as well as a good idea ot the recuperative power of the country, for when the enemy drove every soul out of Charlestown, and burne0every building there, X it was but five! undred holluses in all that were destroyed, while to-day the population ap- proaches the number of forty th, usand It is a population, however, that must have under- gone many changes; as, for instance, one would fancy that its action of thirty yea-rs ago, in the destruction of the Ursuline Convent, would, at present, be quite impossible, since the Catholic Church now far outnumbers any other single sect in the place--for the Catholic Church has a subtle, sell-healing way with it like that belonging to some natural organishm, so that where it has received a wound, 1hither it immediately sends its best and freshest blpod to repair the harm, as the case. is with the limb of an aninmal or the branch of a tree, and thus mending itself and growing with greater vigor where the hurt was, it presently outstr ips in- jury, and plants itstlf in the place of its assail- ant. . The Ursuline Convent Just mentioned be- longed, at the time of its demolition, to one of the congregations of Ursulines founded some three hundred years earlier as a religio s sis- telhood for nursing the sick, relieving a d in- structing the poor, and named for the ma rtyred St. Ursula, a Christian princess of Britain, and one of the first to associate maidens with her- self for devout purposes. Originally every Sis- ' ter remained in her own home, and performed from that point such duties as were hers; but shortly after the death of Angela Meric, the foundress, they adopted a uniform dress, their principles and plan of action became more widely spread, and they gradually gathered together under the same roof, chose a Direct- I ress, or Superior, and to k some simple vows, C vows afterward exchanged for others of a more c solemn nature. In the year 1860 there were 1 more than five hundred houses of Ursulines in ] the world; and, never entirely abandoning v their original purpose, they are to-day p-inci- 1 pally devoted to the tuition and care of young girls; and of such benefit to the general com- I mnunity have they always been considered, that, t when certain European Governments Dut an end 1 to the existence of convents within their ter- l rltory, the Ursullnes were permitted to remain T unmolested, and were moreover aided and en- p couraged in their work. The ruins of the e Ursuline Convent in Charlestown stand in a f y remote part of the town, lately taken Into the B- village of Somervi le, on a place known as a Mount Benedict, and smoke-blackened and d weather-beaten, the broken walls and chimneys y have stood for more than thirty years till be- - coming picturesque with time. Wild cherry e trees have sprung up within the walls of the I cloisters, and have grown into full bearing of - their bitter fruit; cattle browse among them, 3 and lie beneath the great trees that have, arched d themselves, untaught, over the old avenues; - sheep crop the turf where once the nuns' flower- t garden may have been, and where, long since, 1 the natural growth of the place has retaken its a own rights, and where here and there a weed t blooms, which is only a garden-flower Peturned , to its one original stock. One side of the hill com- -mards the harbor and the placid Charles, with $ a view of the neighboring metropolis, just re- ) mote enough for a haze of distance to render t it poetic; and on the other sicle, far away r across meadows and bending elms, the blue fand lovely Mystic winds to the sea, and soft, low hills inclose the wide and varied land- scape. It is a retreat of peace, that now re- mains unbroken by anything except the rude- ness of the winter storms, but it bears upon it the moss-grown marks of a violence sadly in contrast, for thirty-five years ago it was the scene of an outrage on human rights and free- dom of thought, which, it is to be hoped, neither this country nor this age shall behold again. The convent had been founded in 1820 by Doc- tors Matigon and Cheverus with lunds contribu- ' ted for that purpose by a resident and native of the city of Boston ; and upon their urgency a few Sisters of the Ursuline Order came to this country, and made Boston their home. The confinement and the city air, however, dis. turbed their health, accustomed as they had been to the out-door exercise of their gardens, and, some half-dozen years after their arrival, the bishop procured for them the estate in Charlestown, to which they immediately re- moved, occupying a farmhouse at the foot of the hill till their own residence upon the sum- nit should be completed. This was done in the next year, and it was shortly so crowded with pupils from New England, the West Indies, Southern States and British provinces, that a couple of years afterward two large wings were added to the establishment, the number of nuns 'varying from lour to ten, and the pupils from filty to sixty. The feeling In Charlestown toward them could hardly ever have been of a hospitable nature, for one of the Selectmen of the town, who appears to have been of a very inflammable temperament, told the Superior that it had been his intention on the first night of the occupancy of the farmhouse by the nuns to come with thirty men and tear it down about their ears, but he was deterred by the quiet procession of the little company taking their walks across the bill next day, which appears to have been a moving sight to him, Welcome or not, however, the school prospered wonder- fully, as indeed it could hardly help doing when the teachers were so devoted to their duties, the fact of their being devoted for life being probably the chief secret of their success. There was then comparatively little attention paid to science and the severer studies gen- erflly, and the education of women was con. fined almost especially to the accomplishments page: 10-11[View Page 10-11] of language, music, and painting, which were taught here to perfection; and, thronged with pupils and applicants, it is possible the school aroused the jealousy of those who conjectured the good Income which it yearly added to the revenue: of a Church they abominated. There was no need, though, of adding this Jealousy to the elements at work In the 4eigh- borhood already distrustful of Roman Catholic institutions, keeping a vigilant lookout over what it considered as little less than a branch of the Inquisition introduced into the midst of it, constantly fearful of Catholic supremacy- not from any largeness of view concerning the Church as a Church of authority denying the right of individual opinion, and thus a drag upon the wheels of progress, but with an Im- agination Inflamed by the wood-cuts of "Fox's Book of Martyrs," by such legends as that old - one of the unfaithful nun, sealed up alive in a wall, and regarding the quiet building on the hill not as a place of innocent merriment and girlish study, but of severe penance, of hor- rible punishment, of underground cells and passages through which all the mighty power of the Church walked abroad to crush any refrac- tory spirit into death or submission. There were sad rumors of barbarities exercised upon the sick, of a child sent away in an advanced stage of scarlet-fever, of fearful penances imposed upon a dying nun. It was also urged that the Convent made great effort to secure the chil- dren of Protestants for proselyting purposes, excluding the children of Catholics; oblivious of the truth that its doors were open to all who were able to meet the cost of such expensive education, that, its pupils being chiefly daugh- ters of the wealthy, there really belonged to Catholic parents a proportion -of them corre- sponding to the proportion of wealthy Catholics in the community at large, while for poorer Catholics a free school already existed in Bos- ton, where their education was provided for quite suitably to their probable station in life ; and in the meantime not a single pupil, in all the number educated in the convent, had ever become a nun, nor had one even been con- verted to Catholicism: But more than this in- herited dread of papacy and its influence were the swarms of suspicions of another sort. It makes one doubtful of the inherent worth of human nature to hear the baseness of conjecture indulged in by these people; it seems as if they were so vile themselves that they could believe in the virtue of no others; because priests assumed to be celibate and nuns to be virgin, they denounced the good bishop as a monster and the stainless Sisters as prodigies of impurity. And as time wore on, and all these unfortunate feelings and fancies glowed more and more hotly, it needed but a single spark to kindle the flame of intolerance into open action among this population, watchful, and ready to give the worst possible construc- tion to every simple circumstance. The flame was kindled quickly enough. In the summer of 1834 there were fifty-four young girls, from all parts of the country, students in the convent, and ten nuns resident there---wo of the latter being novices, and therefore doing nothing n .the schoolroom. Of these fifty-four young girls, it is probable that nearly all took music-lessons, while there appear to have been but two of the nuns attending to music-one of these an invalid already in consumption*-so that the greater part of the hundred and odd music-lessons a week fell to the share of the other-Sister Mary John, formerly, when in the world and retaining the name of her birth, a Miss Elizabeth Harrison. Miss Harrison was a native of Philadelphia, had passed her noviti- ate of two years, and had for four years been a member. in full communion. She had abrother and a brother-in-law living in Boston, across the bridge, and visiting her at the convent whenever they chose ; and as she had, besides, unrestricted opportunities of reposing coi fl dence in her pupils, had she desired to be taken from the convent nothing would have been easier-all the more as no restraint was put upon an individual there; and two nuns who had taken the vail had left, without let or hindrance, and still maintained friendly rela- - tions with the Superior. She had been giving steadily fourteen lessons a day of forty-five miLutes each; 'any one who has studied or taught music, or who has been present during a lesson in that art, knows wh t an exquisitely trying thing to the nerves it is, and Miss Har- rison was not only tired and weak, but her brain was in a state of high excitement. Sev- eral members of her family had been subject to occasional mental alienation-a circum- stance of which bad the Ursulines been aware upon her reception among them, they would probably have allotted her less fati-uing du- ties. Old Dr. Warren had already, pronounced Miss Harrison's health to be very delicate ; al- ways in excessively cold or warm weather she had trouble in her head, and feeling this quite badly, at about the last of July, she had fool- ishy taken an emetic which had acted strangely with her; she began to manifest great rest.- lessness, went abou:t the house acting extrava- gantly, clamoring for new instruments, setting' the doors wide open as if to cool her fever, and when, one afternoon, the Superior told her that she looked too ill to be attending to the lessons, Pjhe.-replied by a burst of laughter, and hti nervous excitement culmi' nating in delirium as the heat of the day in- creased, she slipped out of the convent, into the grounds, and away to a neighbor's house, unobserved by the Sisters, who would never have dreamed of such a thing, as she was a persoif incapable of disguising her feelings, and had never before been heard to express- the least dissatisfaction, but of whom, on the con- trary, it was thought that there could not be a happier person than she in the whole Ursuline Order. From the neighbor's house she was taken by the Selectman, himself another neigh- bor, and the one who had at first intended to tear down the farmhouse about the nuns'. ears, to the residence of a gentleman in West Cam- bridge, after which, going to the convent, he notified the Superior of what he had done, and on the next day the brother of the young lady' went to see her. Probably the rest from, her labors and the change of scene had already acted beneficially on Miss Harrison's mind, for she implored her brother to brin g Bishop Fen- wick to her, as if she longed for his assistance in regaining her self-control. It would seem that the bishop had been disinclined to inter- fere ; but, on the solicitation of the Superior, he went with Miss Harrison's brother in the after. noon to visit her. Bishop Fenwick testified upon oath that he found Miss Harrison in a state of derangement, her looks haggard, her expressions incoherent, wnile she laughed and cried in the same moment ; that his one object in going for her was to take her to the .onvent, clothe her properly, and send her to her friends, presumingthat she left because dissatis ied with her mode of treatment; but when he proposed her return to her home, she begged and en- treated to be allowed to remain, U )on her restoration to the convent, she declared that "she did not know what It all meant,", and she begged the people who called upon her not to refer any-more to the circumstances of her brief absence, for she could not be res onsible for what she then said or did. To Miss Alden ,who in past times had heard her frequently say that she could never cease to be thankful enough for having been called to that happy state of life, and who now visited her, she ex- pressed the greatest horror at the step she had taken, and said chat she would prefer ypOath to leaving. And upon being examined in court, on the trial of the rioters, she averred that had any one ever told her she should do what she had done, she would have thought it imiossi. ble ; that nothing was omitted, In the conduct of the institution, that could contribute to her happiness or to that of the other Inmates ; that her recollection of what took place after her flight was very indistinct, for she was bereft of reason; and she covered her face and burst into tears. - The worst conjecture, one would have SCAIP OF TEB 4 MYSTERIOUS LADY"FBRO M HE URSULINE CONVENT OF MT. BIRMTCT.--. "RIM NERVOU ,X01TEMNTr. cTLMNATN IN D]LiRIUM, BSHR SLPPED OUT OF THB CONvEINT." page: 12-13[View Page 12-13] tl;ought, that, in uncharlty, could have been put upon this affair, would have been that, never of very strong mind, and now worn out with the unceasing recurrence of her labors, she had suddenly imagined the life unbearable, and in a wild moment had escaped from it only to find herself grown unused to the world, and more unhappy there than over her old tasks in the convent. But that was truth beside the calumnies that instantly sprang into being upon the foundation of this unfortunate occurrence. It was remembered, too, that another young woman had le:t Mount Benedict not long pre- viously, and the atrocious slanders upon the sisterhood which she scattered wherever she went were revived with added burden, and there was hardly any scandal possible to be in- vented but was repeated and believed, till the stately brick edifice on the hill was honestly re- garded far and near, by the bigoted and narrow. minded of the untaught population, as a den of w:ckedness and filth; and a conspiracy for its suppression was hurriedly formed, not only in Char:estown, but throughout other towns and extending into other. States. Matters probably were greatly hastened then by the appearance in one of the neighboring newspapers of a para- graph entitled "The Mysterious Lady," and containing the Items of local gossip about Miss Harrison's escapade, magnified and exagge- rated into the flight of a nun brought back by force, and either murdered, secreted in the underground vaults, or sent away for some awful punishment in remoter regions; and this was only the visible at d audible expression of what appears to have been in the minds of nearly all, if riot in their mouths; and the first manner in which the general feeling outcropped 'was by waylaying the convent-gardener and beating him within an inch of his life, wreak- ing in a vicarious way the vengeance that could not yet arrive at his employers. A few days after Miss Harrison's return to Mount Benedict, the Lady Superior, whom Dr. Thompson, a Charles, own physician, has men- tioned as "thoroughly educated, dignified in her person, and elegant in her manners, pure in her morals, of generous and magnanimous feelings, and of high religious principles," was rude y waited on by one of the Selectmen of the town-the same whose k;nd intentions respect- ing the farmhouse have been mentioned-and informed. that the convent would be destroyed If the Mysterious Lady could not be seen. The Superior had already told this gentleman the state of Miss Harrison's health, and the inci- dents leading to her temporary aberration of mind, and she knew it was quite in his power to contradict any wrong Impression abroad, and to quell any uneasiness without troubling her urather; but, it being Sunday, shte now ap- pointed Monday, the next day, for the five Se- lectmen to be shown over the establishment, and included in her invitation two neighbors who had been instrumental in increasing the popular prejudice. On Monday the visitors came, and ferreted the house through from 'cellar to cupola, occupying three hours, look- ing even into the paint-boxes, searching every closet, opening every drawer, assisted by the Mysterious Lady, Miss Harrison, herself, in per- son. Their errand done, they declared them- selves satisfied that not only was there nothing -to censure in the least, but, on the other hand, much to praise,- and they adjourned to the house of one of their number to prepare a pronuncia. mento to that purpose for the morning papers. They had but little more than left the building, just before sunset, whpn a group of men gathered about the gates of the avenue, using impertinent language, but, upon the Superior's r notifying the Selectmen, sone was assured there was not the least prospect of the occurrence of anything disagreeable. It was shortly after nine in the evening when she became more seriously alarmed by a great noise on the Med- ford road, made by an advancing Rmob, with cries of i' Down M ith the convent! Down with the convent!"With much presence of mind, she instantly aroused the Community, telling them she feared they were in danger-the riot- ers on the road, meanwhile, constantly increas- ing in force with new arrivals, on foot and in wagons, from every quarter. After waking , those that were a leep, she went into the se- cond story of the building, and, throwing up a window, asked the party of forty or ffty gathered outside what they desired, adding that they were disturbing the slumbers of the pupils, some of whom were the children of their most respected fellow-citizens. They re- plied that they did not mean to hurt the chil- dren, but they must see the nun that had run away. The Superior went to 'fetch her, but found that she had fainted with fright, and lay insensible in the arms of four of the Siters. The Superior then returned to tell the people that this was the case; she asserted to them that the establishment had that day been visited by the Selectmen, who had been pleased with all they saw, and would assure them of it, and that if they would call on the next day, at a suitable hour, they should have every satisfac- tion. They asked her if she were protected,' and she answered, 44 Yes? by legions!" invok- ing the celestial guardians. But other parties having come to swell their numbers, they re- plied in indecent terms, calling her an old figurehead made of brass, telling her that she was lying, and that they had one of the Select- men with them who had opened the gates to them. The Selectman then came forward, and advised the Superior to throw herself on his protection, but as he was the same Selectman whose officiousness had already produced much of the trouble, the Superior, after asking him ,if he had secured the attendance of any other members of the board, refused-to trust her es- tablishment to his safe-keeping, telling him, if he wished to befriend her, first to disperse the mob. This he feebly attempted, deterring the rioters from firing the building, when they called for torches, by telling them that if lights were brought they would be recognized and detected--after wl;ich noble effort he returned to his house, and valiantly went to bed. The mob then fired a gun in the labyrinth under the willow-tree3, possibly as a token of * some sort to their accomplices, and withdrew a little, while waiting for the fresh arrivals. At about eleven o'clock the fences were torn up and a bonfire kindled. which is believed to have been a concerted signal for the presence of all the conspirators, and the bells being rung as for an alarm of fire) both in Cbarlestown and Boston, multitudes pressed to the spot. Several fire-engines also appeared-the Charles. town ones balting opposite the bonfire. and one from Boston passing up to the front of the mansion, where it was seized upon by the mob and prevented from doing any- service when needed, if so inclined. Rumor still runs that at this point, when Boston would have sent other engines and further means to subdue the disturbances, the drawhridges were lif,ed, and it was found to be impossible to get them down. The arrival of the engine from Boston was, however, instantly followed by an assa nit upon the building in the shape of a shower of brick- bats and .clubs against the windows, after which the bold assailants waited to see ifany defense was to be made, or anyresentment manifested to this attack, which tlkey knew might kill or allm many of the helpless inmates. This brief pause allowed the Lafly Superior opportunity to marshal hier little flock, whom she had refused previously to allow to leave the building, lest that should be only betraying it to its destruc- tion, and under convoy of thla terrified Sisters to secure titeir retreat down the garden, into the summer-house, and over the fence into the adjoining grounds, where they were safe till they could be collected in a friendly house: there had -been sixty children to be taken cate of, and of the nuns that night one was in the last stages of pulmonary consumption, one was in convulsive fits, -and Miss Harrison had been wrought, by the agitation ( f the even- ns, to a raving delirium. The Superior, having per- formed this dluty, lingered herself, with' the true spirit of a leader in such situatic n, open- ing the doors of every room and looking into every dormitory, calling every child by name, to be suie that none were left behind, and then, last of all, descendinf to her own room to secure the valuables there, together wits a thousand dollars belonging to the revenue of the institution ; but belore the last of this children had left the builaing the va-lets had poured in, and as sht; herself fled from it they were but ten feet behind her. In a mo- ment afterward the house was filled with the mob, shouting, yelling, and blaspheming; torches snatclhed froln the engines lighted t\e way for them, they ransacked every room, rifled every trunk, broke open every drawer, stole watches, thrust the costly jewelry of t'he Spanish children into their pockets, split up the piano-fortes, shattered the splend'd harps, anl even made way with the altar ornaments presented by the good Archbishop of Bordeaux. Having satisled their curiosity and greed, tney piled up the filrniture, curtains, books, pic- tures, in the cenjtre of the several rooms, and deliberately set fire to every heap, threw in the altar vestments, the Bible and the cross, and, the act of virtue consummated, left the building in flames. After this, the bishop's lodge experienced a similar' fate, tLe farm- house belonging to the institute followed, and the grand demonstration of proper religious sentiment itound up with tearing apen the tomb of the place, pillaging the sacred vessels there, stealing the coffin-plates, and s attering the as8hes of the dcad to the four winds. Not a hand was lifted to stay these abomina- ble proceedings, by any one of the vast multi- tude outside; t: e firemen, who declared fre- quently treat they could prevent the flames if allowed, were hindered irom acting-although their sincerity may be suspected fron the fact that an engine returned to Boston decked with the flowers stolen from the altar; tLe magis- trates neither made any re i onstrance, nor read the riot-act, nor demanded help of neigh- "EGEND OF CHARLESTOW-S. RUINS OF THE URSPULINB CONVENT OF MT. BENEDICT. boring towns, nor asked for the services of the marines at the Navy Yard, nor made a single arrest during all the seven hours of the riot. And thou gh ithe outside multitude, who took no palt in the crime, were all Protestants, not one of them dared to protest against this out- rage, not only upon weakness and delenseless- ness, but upon civil liberty, End all remained paralyzed until the end, doubtful rerhaps if i there were enough disapprovers among them to be of any avail, and entirely forgetful that a ! stream fr om a single engine-hose would have I dispersed the whole mob more quickly than a battery could hasve done. Meanwhile the, nuns, escaping with difficulty, and wlt h set greater difficulty supporting the young consumptive, Sister Mary St. Henry, and getting her across the fence at the garden's foot, had found a kindly shelter, and were shortly afterward invited by old General Dear- born to his seat in Roxbury, called Brinley Place, v here they found once more a home, although, before they were fairly settled there, Mary St. Henry died, at the age of twu nty. Though an invalid, this young woman had been able to give a lesson on the day of the destrue- tion of the convent; all that night she lay in a cold rigor, and eleven days afterward shed was dead. Her funeral was one of unusual pomp; every Catholic in the vicinity made an object of. attending, half the citizens ot Boston were organized into a special police through expect- ation of some requital, and so deeply roused were the feelings of the injured party, that it is probable nothing but t' e most unremitting exer- tions of their clergy prevented severe retaliation. The matter, however, (iid not end here im- mediately. Loud expressions of disapprobation were iheard from all portions of the St; te, and a self-constituted Committee, of the best names in Boston, including such as Robert C. Win- throp, William Appleton, Horace Mann, The- ophilus Parsons, and Thomas Motley, prepared i at once to investigate the affair, and tring, if page: 14-15[View Page 14-15] possible. the .miscreants to ust!oe. They ex- amined more than one hundred and forty per- sons, and, chiefly by their exertions, thirteen arrests were made, of which eight were of a capital nature. The young woman who had scattered the isroclous slanders was visited, and she retracted everything but the ass rtions relative to the severe penances of the sick nun; but even on that point her word was discredited by means of other witnesses, the sisters by birth Of Mary St. Henry; it was proved that she had been a charity-student in the Institute, desirous of taking the vail, admitted on probation for six months to discover if she had either capacity, sincerity, or strength of character, falling to dis- play which she was about to be dismissed, when- she left secretly. Miss Alden, a young lady who had taken the white vail at Mount Benedict, and afterward freely left it, testified that, upon living there two years, she became convinced that she had no vocation for an ascetic life, and made her feelings known to the Superior, who advised her accordingly, strongly as they were attached to each other, to depart if she could not be happy there, of which no one could judge but herself, and to her decision it should be left, for their rules allowed no one to remain except such as found their happiness there, and there only. "She told me," said Miss Alden, "that I was at liberty to go when I pleased, and should be provided with every- thing requisite for my departure-.which was done two years after, having remained that length of time merely from personal attach- ment to the Lady Superior." And it was equally evident that others desiring to do so had -been allowed to separate themselves from the Community in the same manner. The charge of inhumanity to the sick was also sifted, and found amounting to nothing; tle child with the scarlet-fever having been sent home upon the first symptom of the disease, to prevent the Infection's reaching the remaining Children. And to an assertion in relation to secret vaults beneath the building, the mason, one Peter Murphy, who laid the foundations, declared, under his own signature, that nothing of the kind existed. Although unanimously opposed to the Roman Catholic forms of re- ligion, the Committee published a most mag- nanlmous report of their investigation; and finally a man by the name of Buzzell was brought to trial as a ringleader in the late atrocity. He received, however, a very singu- tar trial; one of the )urymen was several times seen to be asleep; and though it was proved to be he that had beaten the convent-gardener, that had been seen actively encouraging the rioters, breaking the doors, bringidng tar-barrels and firing them, and though on the retirement of the jury they stood seven to five tor convic- tion, on the way from their room to the court- room they became unanimous for acquittal The only person ever punished for complicity in the affair, was a mere bboy, convicted on very insufficient evidence. but for whom it was probably supposed the penalty would be made right; he was sentenced to imprisonment for life, his mother died of a broken heart, and finally he was pardoned out, ruined. and old before his time. There all proceedings ended. The nuns were invited to establish themselves at Newport, in thfe land where Roger Williams made religious toleration a fact, but the propo- sition was declined, partly perhaps because the attack showed where their work was needed, and partly in the belief that Massachusetts would render justice, inasmuch as having al- ways paid for protection, when then the protec- tion was withheld the State became responsible for all damages. This responsibility has never been met. Repayment has been constantly urged by all denominations; Theodore Parker made himself especially prominent In the mat- ter; but, owing to a mistaken judgment fl what the popular opinion may be, no Legislature has yet been found with sufficient courage to make an appropriation to reimburse the Convent for its losses, and in refusing this demand for pay- ment the State has virtually repeated the out- rage year by year. Perhaps no more scathing commentary on the whole matter will ever be made than that to be found in the following exact copy: "NOVEMBER 26, 1834. "Received of Bishop Fenwick, the sum of seventy-nine dollars and twenty cents, the same being taxes assessed by the Assessors of the town of Charlestown, upon the laud and build. ings of the late Convent of Mount Benedict, for the year 1834, and which were this day de. manded- by Solomon Hovey, Jr., Collector, agreeably to instructions received by Lim from the Assessors, to that effect, although said buildings had been destroyed by a mob in Au- gust laet. "$79.20. (Signed) "SOLOMON HOVEY, Jr., Collector.' SALEM. WHEN the traveler loses sight of Charles- towin, with its twin but incongruous monu- ments, his train is passing out on the meadows dotted with haycocks and alive with every tint of red and russet, and presently is skirt ng the shores of Swampscot and Lynn. Here, per- haps, he glances up at the High Rock com- manding sight of the dim line of the Beverley beches, of the Cape Annkhadows, the eagged coast of Marbleheaid, the long sweep of the Swampscot sands, the wild cliffs of Nahant,- and the immense horizon of the bay beyond- a spot where Moll Pitcher for so many years performed her mysteries; and twenty minutes afterward the train is running into a region where witch and warlock, once holding revel, still haunt every inch of the ground. This re- gion, whose centre is known as the town of Salem, is very lovely in the river-banks and villas of its outskirts. For the towr itself, slight marks remain of the old Puritan comina- tion, and its days of East Indian glory and spicy argosies are over. Reminiscences of that glory, however, continue to give caste in the place, and every lady in Salem has a cachemire shawl, it is said, or else has no passport to society; and great warehouses and great fortunes remain to tell of the state that has passed away. Among the smaller towns 'along the coast, Salem is still the most wealthy, and is therefore the target for much ill nature on the part of her poorer neighbors. Nothing equalsthe contemp-, which a Lynn man feels for a citizen of Salem, unless it is the contempt w hich a Gloucester man feels, or that which a Salem man not only feels but manifests, for both of the others and the rest of creation besides. In Marblehead this I osthty reaches more open expression, and the mutual se ntiments of both populations are uttered by the urchins there when they cry: "Here comes a Salem boy-let's rock him ro md the corner 1"Nevertheless, Salem contr-ves to creep along, to found her museum, to Become headquarters for the Essex Institute, and to make herself, in ever so slight a measure, a centre .of culture and advance. Lately the Scientific Societies met there, and were--un dreamed-of thing-invited, home to dinner: In -a town where, if necessity obliges you to oall upon a man at his club# he comes out and shuts the door behind him, keeping a grasp upon the handle as an intimation of the brevity of your visit-where Choate and Webster, pleading in court, have picked up a luncheon, at noontide, in hotel or eating-house, as best they might, and where Hawthorne all but 'starved. Salem is conspicuous among New England towns for the beauty of its women; a plain face would be an anomaly there, and the well-fed blood of wealthy generations is told by the bloomy skins and abundant tresses the expression of sweetness and dignity, the soft eyes and fine features, of the daughters of the place. The town still preserves a few redes of its memorable past; the House of the Seven Gables was standing there,a little while ago, together with the Townsend-Bishop house, famous for its share in the old witchcraft trans. actions, and the Corwin house, at-the corner of North and Essex streets, where the Grand Jury sat upon those transactions. There are some handsome churches and public buildings of more modern date, and a stone Court-house, together with a fine Registry of Deeds. There is an interest attaching to this latter structure, not altogether archaeological though concern- ing itself with antiquities, but an interest in one of the darkest problems ever presented by human nature; for here are kept such docu- ments as have been preserved from the witch. craft days, and among them the death-warrant of Bridget Bishop. Very few indeed are these papers; for, when the frenzy of the period began to subside, those "Salem Gentlemen" who petitioned the Government to grant no re- prieve to Rebecca Nurse, a woman who had lived nearly eighty years of a saintly life, were over- taken by remorse and shame, and bastened to do away with all remembrance of their recent ao- tion, exhibiting a better sense of the fitness of things than their descendants do-who to-day display in a sealed vial a dozen bent and verdi- grised and rusty pins purporting to be the identical ones with which their forefathers plagued the witches; albeit, it is said, the fashion of these pins was not known at the time when those poor wretches were tor. mented. Indeed to the stranger in the town witchcraft is the one thought; he looks at these people whom he meets upon the street, and they become to him curious subjects of page: 16-17[View Page 16-17] conjecture as he reflects that intermarriage has obliterated the ancient feud and rancor, and wonders in what way it is that in these indi- viduals the blood of afflicted, persecutor, and accused, together, accommodates itself. One would look for the birth of strong character- istics here, possibly for terrible developments out of the opposition of such material; but nothing notable ever happens in the tranquil town, and not a ripple of distinction breaks its history since those first dreadful days, unless we recall the vanished figure of Hawthorne walking all his life long in the shadow of that old witch-prosecuting ancestor, the Magistrate. But much inheritance of a thing dies uwith the memory of it, and when the scales dropped from the eyes of the persecutors of 1692, and they saw themselves the shedders of innocent blood. they destroyed all records that could he found, reseated the church so that relatives of the murderer and of the murdered sang their hymns side by side from the same book, and since those who had borne the stain of the scaffold in their family were not likely to make it subject of conversation, those who inflicted that stain were glad to let it be forgotten ; and it came to pass that, when the historian sought for it, he found less tradition existing rela- tive to the occurrences of that dark and bloody period than of times of quadruple the antiquity. It reached him, though, from all unimagined avenues, from church-records, from registries of wills and deeds, from family pa- pers, and we now have it in sufficient complete- ness to make us detest, if not the people, at least the influences that made the people actors in that tragedy. Like most things of magnitude, the Salem Witchcraft had its beginnings in small things-- in so small a thing, indeed, as a circle of young girls meeting together, on winter evenings, at each other's houses, to practice palmistry and such sleight-of-hand as parlor-magic had then attained. Perhaps it was as remarkable a ; thing as any, in the whole occurrences that such meetings were countenanced at all in I that place of the Puritan, and more remark- i able still, that ho connection was suspected i between these meetings and the subsequent N antics. These young girls were ten in number; C three of them were servants, and two of these c are believed to -have acted from malicious t motives against the families where they were c employed, one of them afterward admitting t that she did so; and Mary Warren's guilt, as a capitul .witness securing the execution ot seven t innocent persons, being-unless we accept the c hypothesis of spiritualism-as evident as it is p black and damning. In addition to these there t were the negro-slaves of Mr. Parris, the min- t iste/, in whose household all the firEt disturb- c ances made their appearance, Tituba and her o husband. S It is worthy of remark, as the historian i] urges, that Elizabeth Parris-a child of only tl nine years, but of extraordinary precocity, the b daughter of the minister, himself the foremost fl fomenter and agitator of the troubles-was h early removed by him from the-scene, and a placed under shelter at safe distance. Of the b remainder, the most prominent were Abigail o Williams,; ged eleven, a niece of the minis- b ter's, and resident in his family; Ann Putnam, aged twelve ; Betty Hubbard aLd Mary Walcot, in both aged seventeen; and Mercy Lewis, of the sc L same age, a servant in the family of Ann Put. d nam's mother, Mrs. Ann Putnam, aged thirty, i- who afterward became as prominent as any in d the matter of afflictions. There were a Mrs. e Pope and a Mrs. Bibber, who joined the circle; r- but the one was only hysterical, and the latter 3, was detected in a trick, and their connection t with the phenomena was brief. It is not un- i1 reasonable' to suppose that Tihuba was at the s root of the whole business. Brought by Mr. s Parris, who had formerly been a merchant, from e the West Indl(s, and still but half-civilized, she t was full of her wild Obeah superstitions and ncantations, in which she had without doubt e interested the two children in her master's I family, Elizabeth Parris and Abigail Williams, I Probably they invited Ann Putnam, a child of t nearly the same age as themselves, to witness e what they found so entertaining; and she, f confiding in her mother's servant, Mercy Lewis, r an ignorant girl of seventeen, Mercy in turn I interested her own companionsin the matter. a Sitting over the winter fires, after growing tired of their exercises in magic, it is likely that they rehearsed to each other all the mar- velous tales of the primeval settlements, stories full of sheeted ghosts, with wild hints of the Indian goblin Hobbomocko, till they shuddered and laughed at the shuddering, and tUeir ter- rified imaginations and excited nerves were ready for something beyond. Perfecting them- selves in all they could d scover of legerdemain, taught by Tituba the secret of a species of vol- untary cataleptic f, and improving on her teachings by means of their onn superior in- -telligence, before the winter was over they had become adepts in their arts, and were ready for exhibition. It is likely that at fi;st their object was merely to display their skill, to make amusement and arouse wonder, and, possibly, admiration, in their beholders, who singularly failed to perceive that it was a con- certed thing among them. -Perhaps, too, they were somewhat emulous of the fame of the Goodwin children, whose exploits had lately been on every tongue. When the crowds, who afterward flocked to see those whom min- isters and doctors had pronounced bewitched, witnessed their appalling condition, they were overwhelmed with horror; fo., ' whatever opinion may be formed," says Mr. Upham, "of the moral or mental condition of the afflicted children, as to their sanity and responsibility, there can be no doubt that they were great actors. In mere Jugglery and stelght-of-hand, they bear no mean comparison with the workers of wonders, in that line, of our own day. Long practice had given them complete control over their countenances, intonations of voice, and the entire muscular and nervous organization of their bodies ; so that they could at will, and on the instant, go into fits and convulsions; swoon and fall to the floor; put their frames into strange contortions; bring the blood to the face and send it back agin. They could be deadly pale at one moment, at the next flushed; their hands would be clinched and held together as with a vice ; their limbs stiff and rigid or wholly relaxed; their teeth would be set, they would go through the paroxysms of choking and strangulation, and gasp for breath, bringing froth and blood from the mouth; they would utter all sorts of screams in unearthly tones; their eyes remain fixed, sometimes bereft of all light and expression, "THE REV, GEORGE BURROUGHS WAS ACCUSED OF WITCHCRAFT ON THE EVIDENCE OF FEATS OF STRENGCT: TRIED, HUNG, AND BJRIED BENEATH THE GALLOWS.'" cold and,-stony, and sometimes kindled into flames of passion; they would pass into the state of somnambulism, without aim or con- scious direction in their movements, looking at some point where was no apparent object of vision, with a wild, unmeaning glare. There are some indications that they had acqu red the art of ventriloqulism ; or they so wrought Upon the imaginations of the beholders -,hat the sounds of the motions and voices of -invisi- ble beings were believed to be heard. They would start, tremble, and be pallid before ap- paritions seen, of course, only by themselves; but their acting was so perfect that all pre- Bent thought they saw them, too. They would address and hold colloquy with spectres and ghosts, and the responses of the unseen beings would be audible to the fancy of the bewildered crowd. They would follow with their eyes the airy visions so that others imagined they also beheld them." M". Upham calls this a high dramatic achieve- ment ; but he goes on to state that the Attor- ney-General, a barrister fresh from the Inns of Court at London, was often present, together with many others who had seen the world, and were competent to detect trickery; and it is, after all, difficult to believe that this parcel of rude girls could have acquired so much dex- terity, and that no diseased condi'lon of mind and nerve assisted them, and that the fit, which were at first voluntary, did not at last page: 18-19[View Page 18-19] take control of them and all their powers. Notwithstanding this doubt, it s .plain that their magic came in on such occasions as the pin-pricking; as, for instance, when one of them, not wishing to reply, had a pin appa. rently run through both her upper and lower lip, and no wound or festering following. On euch occasions, lob, as that when they were found with their arms tied, and hung upon a hook, or their wrists bound fast with a cord, after the manner of the Davenport Brothers of to-day; as that, when an fron spindle, missing thr some time from a house in the village, was suddenly snatched out of the air from the hand of an apparition; or that, when one of them being afflicted by a spectre in a white sheet, in- visible to other than herself, caught and tore the corner of the sheet, and showed the real cloth in her hand to the spectators, who received it undoubtlngly. Their catalepsy, though, or whatever it may be called. was of use to them throughout- whether they chewed soap till they foamed at the mouth, and expertly twisted their supple bodies into long-practiced contor- tions, or whether' what was feigned at first grew real afterward, and they were seized by the flame they had kindled, and became de- mented by the contaglous delirium. It is well understood that the Shakers of the present day are capable of producing similar condi- tions-fits, distortions, trances in which visions are imagined to be seen; and something of the same sort is frequent in the camp-meeting revivals, while shrieking hysterics are now known to be as voluntary as winking; and it has even .been discovered that fixing the eyes and the attention upon a bright spot at a short distance away will Induce a state of coma. Whether they had learned the possibility of such things, or merely simulated them, it is almost impossible to believe that these girls, In the depth of depravity to which they de- scended, were not victims of a temporary in- sanity. Their ready wit and make-shift would lend a color to this supposition, as being only the cunning of the insane, if there had not been so much method in their madness, and there were not too much evidence of a- direct- ing hand behind them. Mr. Upham thinks that they became intoxi- cated with the terrible success of their impos-. ture, and having sowed the wind, were swept away by the whirlwind; they appeared, he says, as the prosecutors of every poor creature tliat was tried, to such degree that their wick- edness seems to transcend the capabilities of human clime; but he goes on to remark that "there is, perhaps, a slumbering element in the heart of man that sleeps forever in the bosom of the innocent and good, and requires the perpetration of a great sin to wake it into action; but which, when once aroused, impels the transgressor onward with increasing mo- mentum, as the descending ball is accelerated in its course. It may be that crime begets an appetite for crime, which, like all other appe- tites, is not quieted, but inflamed by grati- fication.9" A large part of the dlfficlllty in determining the truth about these girls may vanish if we recall the declaration of thg British judge, a few years since, upon the case of Constance Kent, con- fessing the murder of her little half-brother, where he remarked it to be a fact that there was a point in the existence of the young, when,. just coming to the fall sense of life, and occu. pied with that, and generally with a nervous system so delicately organized as easily to be thrown out of balance, they seem to be desti. tute of all natural feeling. of all moral percep. tion, and pliant to any wickedness. These young girls of Salem Village, some of greater pre- cocity than others, were probably all of them within the scope of this declaration, and at an age when they needed careful shielding'and observation, instead ot being left, as they were, to the companionship of servants--servants whose duller minds and lower breeding re- duced all alfference of age to nothing; and the written and signed confession of their rind- leader still remains to render one very cautious in assigning the explanation of their misdeeds to any preternatural or even abnormal cause. It is known, at any rate, that they were several times discovered in deception*; once, on being reproved for it, they boldly answered that they must have a little sport; on another time, one of them was plainly seen to be practising a trick with pins; and, again, one of them crying out that she was being stabbed with a knife, a' broken piece of a knife was found upon her,but a young man in the audience immediately de- clared that, on the day before, he had broken, his knife, this afflicted person being present, and thrown the broken part away, and he pro- duced the haft and remaining portion of the blade to prove it, and though the girl was reprl. manded, she was used, just the same, for wit. ness in other cases. The state of feeling in the Colonies and else- where could not have been more propitious to their undertaking than it was at the time when they opened their drama. Cotton Mather, whose mind was a seething caldron of supersti- tions, had just published the account of the afflicted Goodwin children; Goody Morse was living in her own house at Newhury, under sentence of death, sentence pronounced in Boston, it having been found impossible hith- erto to convict a person for witchcraft in Essex County; and Margaret Jones, and Mistress Anne Hibbins, a sister of Governor BellinR.-g and one of the figures of the '"Scarlet Letter," had, not long beafoe, gee-nung'forpralng the black art; they were the free-thinkers of that day who doubted the verity of witchcraft- Addison believed in it, Edmund Fairfax, the translator of Tasso, believed in it, Sir Thomas Browne gave in court his testimony in behalf of its reality; Blackstone, the fountain of law, asserted that to deny the existence of witchcraft was to contradict the word of God; King James had written diatribes on witches and had perse- ctted them ; Queen Elizabeth had persecuted them; William Penn had presided at the trial oftwo women for witchcraft; thirty years after the executions in Salem, Dr. Watts expressed his persuasion that there was much agency of the devil and some real witches in that affair; and so deeply rooted and long in dying was the superstition, that in -1766 a Presbyterian synod in Scotland denounced, as a national sin, the repeal of the penal laws against witchcraft; in 1808 women were abuse'd for witches oy a whole population within sixty miles'of London, and so lately as the -beginning of this century Father Altizzo was imprisoned at Rome for sorcery, and there were prosecutions for witch- craft in some of the interior districtsof our own Southern States. In the midstof such universal darkness. the people of Salem were not beLind ' the spirit of their age when fancying that their village had become the battle-ground of Anti- christ and possibly they recovered sooner lrom their delusion than other communities of less sturdy and self-asserting habits of thought. might have done. The village, too, presented an excellent field of operation for it had lor many years been torn with dissensions; there Lad been violent jealousies, wrangles and law- suits over the acquisition of large property, through industry and enterprise, by people once in less prosperous circumstances, as for example, the Nurses, and quarrels with the t"Topsfield Men," connections of the Nurses, in relation to boundaries, resulting in fisticuff en- counters and lasting enmities. There had, moreover, been trouble in the parish in rela ion to the impossibility o0 procuring a minister who should please all Parties. Mr. Bayley, Mr. lBur- roughs and Mr. Deodat Lawson having been obliged to leave, owing to the hostilities, mnd Mr. Sam. Parris being settled in their place. Mr. Parris, among several singular qualities, seems to have been almost destitute of s m- pathy-he once told some men whose mo h r's execution he had been instrumental in Probur- ing, that while they thought her innocent and he thought her guilty, the matter between tl em was merely .a diffe ence of opinion; he was possessed of 'great talent, antPof an inordinate ambition; passionately fond of power, and con- stantly stirring up scenes that might lead to it, duining the whole time of his careel he kept the parish in a broil; he had at last grown so un- popular, that some bold strole became necessary in order to regain lost ground, and when the children in his family commenced their per- tformances, it is thought that he saw his ad- vantage, and used it, to the pulling dowL of those who opposed him, and the setting-up of the standard of the Clhurch, in his person, over all other authority. Probably, as Cotton Mather did, he aspired to be the chief champioL ot Christianity, and therefor3 the more exceed- ingly he could inflame the people, and t ien the more effectually quench the flame. the greater glory must redound to him and his ministry; and it is pos sible that neither he nor the "l afflicted children " had originally any idea of the lengti s to which the thing would go; but once committed, there was no retreat. When now the girls began to exhibit their new accomplishments at home, their frightened parents gave them medicine; of course -his did not modify their symptoms, and presently the physician was summoned. Fingding that none of his appliances changed their condit-on,* Dr. Griggs took refuge in a common saying of the time, which bad sheltered the ignorance of many another doctor, and declared that an evil hand had been laid upon them. Then Mr. Parris scented his prey in an instant; he kept the children in an agitation, noised the affair abroad till it' became the talk of town mnd countryside, and the neighbors ran to see the convulsions of the afflicted. shivered with awe when the Sabbath meetings were disturbed by their outhursts, believed they saw the yellow- bird that Ann Putnam saw t" sitting on the min- ister's hat as it hangs on the pin in the pulpit ;" the families of the various afflicted ones fasted and prayed, and finally Mr. Parris called a con- vocation of the ministers to witness the pro- ceedings of these crazy children, half diseased, 'half evil. Upon this the children brought out all the scenes in their repertory at once, and the ministers were astounded; always ready for combats with Satan. here they had him on open ground; they appointed a day of exhorta- tion over the afflicted, and increased the excite- ment of the people to tury, so that nothing was thought of but the sufferings of these victims of the wrath of the Evil One, sufferings whose reality no one disbelieved ; all business became suspended, all labor was left, and the whole community was in a frenzy of fanaticism. A few individuals did n t join the outcry: Martha Corey did not believe there were any witches-- presently she was accused for one and hung; the Nurses and Cloyses and Joseph Putnam ob- jected to the minister's allowing the children of his family to disturb the meeting without so much as a rebuke, and withdrew from their attendance at the church-Rebecca Nurse was hung, Sarah Cloyse was imprisoned, and Joseph Putnam escaped only by arming every member of his family and keeping a horse under saddle night and day for six months, determined, if the marshal came for him with a small posse, to re- sist. but if with an overwhelming force, to fly, choosing rather the mercies of the savage heathen of the forest than the barbarities of these frantic Christians. It is a common error to suppose that the three learned professions lead the people i n point of intelligence. On the contrary, trained in grooves not easy to leave, they remain as they were in the beginning, and almost all ad. vance comes from the outside. This was never better exemplified than in the Witchcraft delu- sion. If the physicians then had possessed either acuteness, skill, or candor, they would have checked the girls in their first spasms; If the ministers had been what they should have been ere daring to undertake the cure of souls, instead of lending countenance to their preten- sions and praying over the girls, they would have punished them and made them fear -the consequences of their manceuvres; if the law- yers had exercised any quality which a lawyer should possess, they would have sifted their testimony till it blew away in the wind, and would have utterly cast out the evidence of spectres, instead of greedily receiving it and hounding on the poor wretches to their death. When justices, deacons, doctors and gentry hurried to wonder over and sympathize with the young impostors, when their leaders came to be mad, it is no marvel that the people lost their head and followed after. In the faith that the girls were bewite .ed, and that Satan ,aqted only through human agencies, they clamored to know who it was that had be. witched them; and thus beset, the girls, either at random or because there was no one to be- friend her, or at Mr. Parris's half-hinted sugges- tion, timidly pronounced a name. t "Goods" they said, ' Goodl "-cheating their consciences, perhaps, by making it only a surname; they had no such timidity by-and-by; and Sarah Good was consequently apprehended. When she was examined, two others had been named, arrested, and were examined with her. Sarah Good was a poor creature-homeless destitute, deserted by her- husband, with a family of children to support by odds and ends of work, by begging from door to door, and scraping together in any way what little she could. Doubtless she was a nuisance in the page: 20-21[View Page 20-21] neighborhood, as most Impecunions and shift- less people are, and her reputation was not satisfactory. Her fate was certain frbm the onset. The people-who were full of horror and of pity for the tortured girls; who 'had been told by the physicians that they were be- witched; who had seen the ministers oracularly confirm this statement; who had heard Mr. Parris make it the subject ol his vehement dis- courses Sunday after Sunday, while the distem- , per of the girls alarmed the congregation; who had lately done nothing bur look for the guilty author of this diabolism, drew a breath of re- lief when at last the witch was named; so plau- sible a person, a vagrant and friendless; and it must be admitted that Sarah Good and Mrs. Osburne-an elderly person, sometimes bed- ridden, sometimes distracted, who absented herself from meetin-and the slave Tituba, were the best possible selections that-the cun- * ning hussies could have nade; and the people were satisfied. Mrs. Osburne died in prison nine months afterward; Tituba confessed-as she subsequently averred, under stress of beat- ings from Mr. Parris--and, lying in jail a year and a month, wax finally sold for her fees; but Sarah Good drank her cup. bitter all her life long, to the bitter dregs. The meeting-house was thronged at her examination; she was placed on a platform in full sight of all there; Mr. Parris had excited every one with his im- passioned opening prayer ; the array of magis- trates, marshal and constable were enough to strike awe into her soul at any time, much more when her life was at stake. Acquainted with want, with sorrow and obloquy, her heart had been hardened, and she gave back no mild answers to the catechising. The justices as- sumed her guilt to be aiready established, en- deavored to make her involve herself, gave leading questions to the witnesses, allowed all manner of abominable interruptions, and brow- beat and abused her. When the afflicted chil- dren were introduced, at a glance of her eye they straightway fainted and went into spasms, cried out that they were pinched and pricked and throttled! and fell stiff as. the d&:ad. Upon being taken to her and touched by her, the color returned to their faces, their limbs re- laxed, they immediately became calm And well; so that it seemed to be demonstrated before the eyes of the credulous audience that the malign miasm had, beep received back again into the witch. She herself could not tell what to make of it, and never doubled the fact that the girls suffered as they see.-ied to do; she only de- clared that it was not she that caused it, and must be the others--which simple exclamation the justices used as a confession of her own guilt, and accusation and evidence against the others. "Wlhat is it that you say," asked Ha- thorne, "when you go muttering away from persons' houses?" "If I must tell, I will tell," she answers. "Do tell us, then." he urges. 6t If I must tell, I will tell: it is the Command- ments. I may say my Commandments, I hope." "What Commandment is it?" Poor Sarah Good could not for the litfe of her remember a Commandment. "If I must tell you, I will tell," she ays then.-- it is a psalm;" and after a time she murmurs some fragment that she has succeeded in recalling. Before long her husband was brought in to testify against her. Sbe was sent to prison-thrice leaping off her horse, railing against the magistrates, and essaying to take her own life-and afterward loaded down with iron fetters and with cords, since it was supposed a witch needed double fastenings, till led out, our months later, to lier execution. Meanwhile her child, five years old, was apprehended for a witch; the marks of her little teeth were shown on Ann Putnitm's arm; Mercy Lewis and the others produced pins with- which she had pricked them ; she was committed to prison and loaded with chains like her mother. Outraged, oppressed, and feeling there was no justice in the world unless the Powers that rule it made her word true, when, upon the scaffold, the cruel minister, Nicholas Noyes, told Sarah Good s e was a witch, and she knew she was a witch, she turned upon him and cried, "You are a liar! and God shall give yourblood to drink!" Twenty-five years afterward, and unrepenting, Nicholas Noyes , led of an internal hemorrhage, the vital torrent pouring from his mouth and strangling him with his own blood. After the first three witches had been pro- claimed, the business began in earnest, and the girls "cried out upon" enough to keep the magistrates' hands full; consternation and ter- ror ran like wildfire through the community, which was unlettered and ignorant to a large degree, the learning of the lathers having died with them, and the schools not being yet estab- lished ; presently everybody was either accused or accusing, there was a witch in every house, the only safety for any was in suspecting a neighbor. If tone extpressed doubt of the afflicted children, he was marked from that moment. The Rev. Fra ncis Dane sus- pected them; his family were cried out upon, two of his children and many of his grandchildren. being imprisonedl, and some sentenced to death. The Rev. John Higginson -of whom it was said, "his very presence puts vice out of countenance. his conversation is a glimpse of heaven "-disbelieved in them; his daughter Anna was committed as a witch. Husba ds were made to criminate their wives children, their parents; when one of the ao- cusing girls 'ell away, she was herself accused, but knowing what to do, was saved by a con- fession of impossibilities. Anything was taken for evidence, the nightmares of' this one, the drunken fantasies of that, the hysterics of the other, and any careless gossip that never should have been uttered at all. If a prisoner dared use any self-vindicatio0l, the vanity and anger of the magistrates were kindled against that one in especial. Hundreois were under -arrest; hundrec s confessed to what they never did, as the only means to save their lives, though afterward frequently. retracting their confessions and going cheerfully to death; the prisons were full, and executions be- gan. The accusations of the afflicted girls mounted by decrees trom simple witchcraft and writing in the Black Man's book, with the familiar of a yellow-bird suckling the fingers, to that of a baptism and sacrament of blood administered by the devil himself, and finally to that of fell and terrible murders. Their narratives were all of the same character, their imaginations filthy and limited in flight, and the only assertions in the whole of their rode- montade of any brilliance was Tituba's reply as to how they went to their place of meeting. "We ride upon sticks, and are there presently," and the description of Mr. Burroughs trunpet's tone to convene his witches--"a sound that reached over the country far and wide, sending its blasts to Andover, and wakening its echoes along the Merrlmack to Cape Ann and t ie ut- termost settlements everywhere." Kindness had no effect upon the girls; when Mrs. Proc- ter-three of whose children their representa- tions ha'l cast into prison, and whom they had torn away from her home, leaving her forlorn 4llttle maid" of four years old to come out and scan the passeirs-by, in hopes each one might be her father or her mother, her brother or her sister come back-when Mrs. Procter mildly said to one of them, "Dear child, it is not so," and solemnly added, "There s an- other judgment, dear cl ld," they redoubled their convulsions, and grew so outrageous that John Procter, protecting his wife from their insults, was himself accused and hung. The prisoners, meanwhile, were crowded in such noisome dungeons, that many died and many lost their reas n; some also were tortured to procure confession---feet and head bound to- gether till the blood poured from eyes and nose. The accusations were by no means con- fined to Salem; Andover, Beverly, Boston, were ransacked to fill them-the girls had tasted blood and were pitiless. A Mrs. Easty was taken from the old Crowningshield Farm in Topsfield (now owned by Mr. Thomas W. Pierce , anid brought to court; she was a wo- man of station and character; even the magis- trates were affected by her mien and tliough Ann Putnam and others cried, 'Oh, Goody Easty, Goody Easty, you are the woman, you are the woman!" she was discharged, Laving endured several weeks' confinement; but upon that there arose such afn uproar among the girls, such fresh fits and tormentings, that, after having enjoyed her home for only two days, she was again arrested by the brutaI Mar- shal Herrick, and presently hung. But even in her last hour this noble woman sent to the Governor a petition in behalf of her fellow- prisoners, yet asking no favor for herself. Mr. Uphanr describes a scene at the trial of Sarah Cloyse, taken every incident from the record, which perfectly illustrates the callousness of these girls. "Then Sarah Cloyse asked for water, and eat down, as one seized with a dying flaintng- fit; and several of the afflicted fell into fits, and some of them cried out, ' Oh, her spirit has gone to prison to her sister Nurse 1' "The audacious lying of the witnesses; the horrid monstrousness of their charges against Sarah Cloyse, of having bitten the flesh of the Indian brute, and drank herself and distributed to others as deacon, at an infernal sacraent, the blood of the wicked creatures making these foul and devilish declarations, known by her to be utterly and wickedly false; and th fact that they were believed by the deputy, the Council, and the assembly, were more than she could bear. Her soul sickened at such unim- ' agnable depravity and wrong; her nervous system gave way; she fainted and sank to the floor. The manner in which the girls trned th, incident against her shows how they were hardened to all human feeling, and the cu ining art which, on all occasions, characterized their proceedings. Th at such an insolent Interrup- tiUon and disturbance, on their part, was per- mitted without rebuke from the Court, is a perpetual dishonor to every member of it. The scene exhibited at this moment, in the meeting- house, is worthy of an attempt to imagine. The most terrible sensation was naturally pro- duced by the swooning of the prisoner, the loudly uttered and savage mockery of the girls, and their going simultaneously into fits, scream- ing at the top of their voices, twisting into all possible attitudes. stiffened tas in death, or gasping with convulsive spasms ot agony, and crying out. at intervals, Thhere is the Black Man whispering in Cloyse's er.' 'There is a yellow-bird flying lonnd her head.' John In- dian, on such occasions, used to confine his achievements to tumbling and rolling his ugly body about the floor. The deepest commisera. tion was telt'by all for the 'afflicted,' and men and women rushed to hold and soothe them. There was, no doubt, much loud screeching, and some miscellaneous faintilgs through the whole crowd. At lengthoby bringing the suf- ferers into contact with Goody Cloyse, the dia- bolical fluid passed back into her, they were all relieved, and the examination was resumed." In fact, neither age nor condition had any effect upon the prosecutors. Rebecca Jacobs, partially deranged, was snatched from her four young children, one of them an infant, and the others who were able to walk following after her, orying bitterly. Martha Carrier, who the children said had promise from the Black Man of b- ing Queen of Hell, and who had sternly rebuked the magistrates, and declared she had seen no man so black as themselves, was made to hear her children, seven' or eight years old, confess themselves witches who had set their hands to the book, testify against her, and procure her death. Rebecca Nurse, past three score and ten, wife of a wealthy citizen, ven- erated by high and low, was brought to trial in her infirm condition, accused by the girls at the very time when she was praying for them. On the jury's bringing in a verdict of innocence, they were reprimanded by the Chief-Justice, and remanded to confinement till they brought in a verdict of guilty ; and though her neighbors made affidavits and petitions in her behalf, she was condemned; after which Mr. Parris, who had long since gotten affairs into his own hands, had intimidated outsiders, and was having everything his own way, prepared one of his most solemn scenes to further excite the people; and Mrs. Nurse, delicate, if not dying as it was. after her shameful trial,- her cruel and indecent exposures, was brought into church, covered with chains, and there excom- municated by her old pastor, Nicholas Noyes- the crowd of spectators believing they saw a woman not only lost for this life, but barred out from salvation in the life to come. She was thrown, after death, .into a hole beneath the gallows ; but her husband and sons recov- ered her body in the night, brought it home to her weeping daughters, and buried it in her own garden. With that, the girls, grown bold, had flown at higher game than any, the Rev. George Burroughs, one of Mr. Parris's rivals and pre- decessors. This person had suffered almost everything in Salem ere leaving it for Casco Bay; he had lost his wife and children there, his salary had not been paid him, and he had even been arrested in his pulpit for the debt of his wife's funeral expenses, which he bad page: 22-23[View Page 22-23] previonely paid by an Order on the church- treasurer. The malignities that he now endured are only explicable by remembering his un- popularity in Salem; he was cast into a black dungeon, accused of witchcraft on the evidence of such feats of strength as holding outla gun by inserting the joint of a finger in the muzzle, and after that accused of the murder of his two wives and of his children, of Mr. Lawson's wife * and child, and of various others, covered with all abuses, and finally hung, and buried beneath the gallows, with his chin aid foot protruding from the ground. Mr. Upham gives a chapter in his trial too graphically to escape quotation here: "The examinatlon of Mr. Burroughs pre- sented a spectacle, all things-considered, of rare interest and curiosity: the grave dignity of the magistrates; the plain, dark figure of the prisoner; the half-crazed, half-demoniac aspect of the girls; the wild, excited crowd; the horror, rage, and pallid exasperation of Lawson, Goodman Fuller, and others, also of the relatives and friends of Burroughs's two former wives, as the deep damnation of their taking off and the secrets of their bloody graves were being brought to light; and the child on the stand telling her awful tales of ghosts in winding-sheets, with napkins round their heads, pointing to their death-wounds, and saying that 'their blood did cry for vengeance ' upon- their murderer. The prisoner stands alone: all were raving around hims while he is amazed, as- tounded at such folly and wrong in others, and humbly sensible of his own unworthiness, bowed down under the mysterious Providence that permitted such things for a season, yet strong and steadfast in conscious innocence and up- rightness." * But though such countless arrests and trials and condemnations were had, and, so many executions, the most startling incident among them all was the death of old Giles Corey. Giles Corey was a man of marked traits, not the least marked of which was an unbending will and a heart that knew no fear. In the course of his long life he had never submitted to a wrong without retaliation, he had suffered no encroachments on his rights, he had cared nothing for the speech of other people, but had always spoken his own mind, let who would stand at the door; he had quarreled with his acquaintances, beaten his servants, sued his neighblors for slander, and, such experience tending toward small self-cont-ol, be had been involved in ceaseless litigation, and as often as not had teen in the right. Late in life he married, for his third wife, Martha. a woman of intelligence beyond her time, and joined the Church; and he was eighty years old when the Witchcraft excitement began. With his ardent and eager temperament. nothing abated by age, he was immediately interested in the afflicted children, and soon as fanatical as the worst in regard to them. That iis wife should laugh at it all, should suppose those God-fear- ing men, the magistrates, blind, should assert there was no such thing as a witch at all, and, when he had seen their agonies with his own eyes, that the afflicted children did but dissem- ble, and should hide his saddle that he might stay at home, and no longer swell the press that urged the matter on, filled him with amazement and rage ; he exclaimed angrily fiat the devil WI4a bher and, for all he knew, she m4ght be a witch herself I When his wife was arrested, these words of his were remembered; he was 'plied in court with artful questions, whose re- plies'must needs be unfavorable to her; two of his sons-in-law testified to his recent disagree. ment with her, to his bewitched cattle, and other troubles, and he was obliged to give a deposition against her. But'he could not be forced to make the deposition amount to any. thing; and, indignant with him Tor that con- tumacy, his wife's accusers became his own, and he was cast into jail for a wizard. Once imprisoned, with leisure to reflect, conscious that he had never used witchcraft in his life, he began to believe that others might be as inp nocent as he, to be aware of the hallncination to which he had been subject, to see that his wife, by that time sentenced to execution, was a guiltless martyr, to feel his old love and ten- derness for her return upon him, to be filled with remorse for his anger with her, for his testimony and deposition, and with his old hot wrath against his two sons-in-laws, whose M ord had done her to death. He comprehended the whole situation, that unless he confessed to a lie nothing could Eave him, that if he were tried he would certainly be condemned, and his property would be con. fiscated under the attainder. He desired in his extremity some punishment on his two un- faithful sons-in-law, some reward for his two faithful ones. He sent for the necessary instru. ments and made his will, giving all his large property to his two faithful sons-in-law, and guarding the gift with every careful form of words known to the law. That properly done and witnessed, his resolve was taken. He determined never to be tried. If he was not tried, he could not be condemned; if he was not condemned, this dls[o-ition of his property could not be altered. The only way to accom- plish this was by refusing to plead either guilty or not guilty, And this he did. When-taken into court he maintained a stubborn silence, he refused to open his lips; and till the prisoner answered "guilty" or "not guilty," the trial could not take place. For this, also, there was but one remedy, and old Giles Corey knew it; but his mind was made up; it was the least atonement be could make his wife-to requite the sons that had been loyal to her, and to meet himself a harder fate than he had given her. Perhaps, too, he saw that it needed such a thing to awaken the people, and he was the voluntary sacrifice. He received unfilnclhingly the sentence of the Peine forte et dure, and fronm that moment never uttered a syllable. This unspeakably dreadful torture condemned one to a dark cell, there, wito only a strip of cloth- ing, to be laid upon the floor with an iron weight upon the chest, receiving the alternate fare of three -mouthtfls of bread on one day, and on the next three draughts of the nearest stagnant water, till obstinacy yielded or death arrived. In Giles Corey's case-excommunica- tion having been previously pronounced on a self-murderer by the inexorable church-mem- bers-the punishment was administered in the outside air, and the weights were of stone; he was str6ng, -in spite of years ; the anguish was long; pressed by the burden, his tongue pro. truded from his mouth, a constable struck it back with his staff, but not a word came with it, and he died unflinching, never pleadiug either guilty or not guilty, With this before unheard-of Judicial murder In the Colonles, a universal horror shilddered through the people already surfeited with horrors, and all at once their eyes opened to the enormity of these pro- ceedings. Three days afterward, the last pro- cession of victims, once hooted and insulted as they went, jolted now in silence through the long and tedious ways to the summit of Witch Hill, and, taking their farewell look at the wide panorama of and and sea, the last witches were hanged. It was in vain for Cotton Mather to utter his incendiary eloquence beneath the gallows and endeavor to rekindle the dying fires in the breasts of the sorry and silent people; for Mr. Noyes to exclaim, as the bodies swung off, 4 What a sad thing it is to see eight firebrands of hell hanging there 1"The min- isters exhorted, the fiantic girls cried out on one and another, and flew at so high a quarry as the wife ot the Rev. John Hale, a woman of almost perfect life; and though Mrs. pale's husband had persecuted others, when the thunderbolt fell on his own roof 'he awtoke to his delirium: then the Commoners of Andover instituted suits for slander, and with trat the bubble burst, and not another witch was hung. The whole Colony was shaken with remnorse, and the reaction from the excitement was like death. The accusing girls came out o" their convulsions unregarded; one or two afterward married; the rest-with the exception (f Ann Putnam, led openly shameless lives. Seven years afterward, bereft of her father and mother, and with the care of a large family ot young brothers and bisters, and a const tution utterly broken down by her career of fits and contortions, Ann Putnam read in the open church a confession of her crimes, partook of the communion, and the tenth year foLowing she died. It is a brief and very strange confes- sion ; in it all the sin is laid upon Satan, and so artlessly that one can but gite her Innocence the benefit of a doubt; and whether the girl was the subject of delusive trances or of wick- edness, must remain a mystery until the s cience of psychology has made further advances than It has done to-day. When the people had fully come to their senses, the jury that had passed verdict on the accused wrote and circulated an avowal of their regret; Judge Sew all -rose in his place in the Old South Church in Boston and made a public acknowledgment of his error, and supplication for forgiveness, and every year thereafter kept a day of humiliation and prayer; but Chief-Justice Stoughton remained as infatu- ated at the last' as at the first; and of the min- isters who had been active in the vile work, Cotton Mather, Sam. Parris, Nicholas Noyes, there is not a particle of evidence that one ofr them repented or regretted it. But Salem Village was ruined, its farms were neglected, its roads broken up, its fences scattered, its buildings out of order, industrial pursuits were destroyed, famine came, taxes were due and lands were sold to meet them, whole families moved away, ant the place became almost depopulated. One spot there, says the histo- rian, bears marks of the blight to-day-the old meeting-liouse road. "Tile Surveyor of High- ways ignores It. The old, gray, moss-covered stone walls are dilapidated and thrown out of line. Not a house is on either of its borders, and no gate opens or path leads to any. Neglect and desertion brood over the contiguous ground. On both sides there are the remains of cellars, which declaxe that once it was lined by a considerable population. Along this road crowds thronged in 1692, for weeks and months. to witness the examinations." It is a satisfaction to the vindictive reader of the annals of this time to know that Sam. Parrls -guilty of divination by his own judgment, since he had plainly used the afflicted clhildren for that purpose-was dismissed froin his pastorate, where he had played the part rather of w Alf than of shepherd, and finished his days in ignominy and want. While every reader will be glad to know that a good man, Joseph Green, came to soothe the sorrows and bind up the wounds, and destroy as much as might be all memory ot wrong and suffering in the place. But though, for a few years, various L gislatlres passed small acts of acknowledgment and compensa- tiod, yet, wars and-other troubles supervening, and possible shame at reopening the past, it so happens that for several o0 the murdered peo- ple the attainder has never been taken off to the present day. page: 24-25[View Page 24-25] NEWBURYORT. TcAVIsO Salem behind, the traveler passes beautiful Beverly, the home ot Lutcy Larcom, and whose beach Is neighbor of the wonderful singing one where the sands make mystical music under foot, passes the litle town which Gall Hamilton renders interesting by living there, passes Ipswich, the old Agawam, the picture of an English village, in a dimple be- tween hills, and with the tides of -its quiet river curving about it, passes ancient Rowley, and arrives at another historic and famous town, whose rulers, once changed its name to Portland, but whose people scorned to do so much as even to refuse the new name, but con- tinued to- the present day to call it Newhury- port. Newhuryport Is in some external respects not unlike the- neighboring towns of note, but in others she is a place by herself. Situated on the Merrlmack--the busiest river in the world, and one of the loveliest,-and whose banks, owing to the configuration of the coast, seem here, like the Nile bauks, to run out and push back the sea that it may have the greater room to expand its beauty in-the town has both a scenic and a social isolation which has had a great deal to do with the characteristics of its population. These char- acteristics, with but one or two .exceptions,. have been the same for all time, since time began for Newhuryport. It is true that the municipality; which once petitioned General Court to relieve it of the burden of the old wandering negress Juniper, has so far improved as now to be giving a pauper outside the alms- house an allowance out of which he has built him a cottage in an adjoining town, and bought him some shares of railroad stock; but for the rest, the place has known no change; it has not varied from its dullness since the Embargo laid a heavy hand upon it and the Great Fire scat- tered ashes over it, and the people mind their own business to-day just as thoroughly as they did when they pronounced the verdict upon the body of Ejzabeth Hunt in 1693 "We Judge, according td'bur best light and contlents, that the death of said Elizabeth Hunt was * * * by some soden stoping of her breat,." Strangers come into town, stay a while, and de- parti leaving behind them some trail of ro- mance or of misbehavior-the citizen takes t B small heed of them, and presently forgets them i so rarely do they assimilate themselves with the population, that. the names there to-day are the names to be found in the chronicles oi 1635, and, unmixed with strange blood, genera- tions hand down a name til it conmes to stand for a trait. The people, too, have a singular intelligence for a community not metropolitan, possibly because, being a seafaring Iribe, their intercourse with foreign countries enlightens them to an unusual degree. The town, except for one religious revival 'that lasted forty days, suspe;.ded business, drew up the shipping in the dock, and absorbed master and mistress, man and maid, has seldom been disturbed by any undue contagion of popular feeling, has seldom followed a fashion in politics unsug. gested by its own necessities, and has been in fact as sufficient to itself as the dew of Ede,. The dissimilarity of its population from that of other places is only illustrated by the story of a sailor,. impressed into the British Navy too hurriedly to get the address of a friend, and who, after tossing abdut the world for fifty. years, returned home and advertised for " an old shipmate whom he deslrqd to share a for- tune with." Neither has the town ever been' a respecter of persons, but, democratic in the true acceptat'on of the term. wealth is but little accounted where almost every one is comfortable, talent gives no more pre-eminence than can be grasped by means of it, and It it were the law now, as it was then, five leading citizens would just as easily be arrested and fined for being absent from town-meeting at eight o'clock in the morning as they were in 1638. United to all this there is an extremely independent way of thinking hereditary among the people. In 1649 Thomas Scott paid a fine of ten shillings rather ti'an learn the'catechism, and was allowed to do so; a century later, Rich- ard Bartlot refused communion with a church whose pastor wore a wig, asserting with assu- rance that all who wore wigs, unless repentinghe- fore death, would certainly be damned; not long before, the Rev. John Tufts here - struck a death-blow at Puritanism by issuing a book of twenty-seven psalm-tunes to be sung in public worship, five tunes only having previously been used; an act so stoutly contested as an inroad of the Scarlet Woman-for, said his opponents, it is first singing by rule, then praying by rule, and then popery-that it was probably owing to the persecutions of the long warfare that subsequently the innovator left his parish in dudgeon under a charge of indecent behavior; and though none of the churches reached the point attained by one some dozen mlles away, which voted, "This meeting, not having unity with John Collns's testimony, desires him to be silent till the Lord speak by him to the satis. faction of the meeting," yet there stands on the record the instruction to a committee ap- pointed to deal with certain recusantsi 4' to see if something could not be said or done to draw them to our communion again, and if we can- not draw them by fair means, then to determine what means to take with them." Some one once said that Newhuryport was famoaus for its " ,- -.. . piety and privateerIng, but in these instructions the piety and privateering are oddly inter- mingled. This same independence of thought found notable expression when, in the early days, Boston and Salem, alarmed at the incur. sions of the Indians, proposed to the next set- tlements the building of a stone wall eight feet high to inclose them all, as a rampart against the common foe; lwhich proposition Newhuryport scouted with disdain, and declared the wall should be a living one, made of men, and forthwith built a garrison-house on her bor- ders. And it is the same quality that after- ward appeared when, some time previous to the Boston tea-party, the first act of the Revolution was signalized in Newhuryport by the confiscation of a cargo of tea under direc- tion of the town authorities: and that prompted ftA. . IN V . \ "8TaNDINO ON MOHB QUATER-DEC]k, ' SNUDDENLY TtRNED AND ORDh^ hD BTHTEISX F'-,AG TO BE STBCE!"' page: 26-27[View Page 26-27] the Stamp Act Riots, and made it a fact that not a single British stt,mp was ever paid for or used In Newhuryport; and that during all the long and trying struggle of the Revolution, did not allow a single town-school to be suspended. The old town has no trivial history, as these circumstances might intimate. Long before the Revolution, at the popular uprising and the imprisonment of Sir Edmund Andros, old Sam Bartlet galloped off, so eager for the fray, that 1" his long rusty sword, trailing on the ground, left, as it came In contact with the stones in the road, a stream of fire all the way." It was Lieu- tenant Jacques, of Newhuryport, who put an end to the war with the Norridgewock Indians, by killing their ally and inciter, the French Jesuit, Sebastian Rallb. Here Arnold's expedi- tion against Quebec encamped and recruited; and here were bui!t and manned not only the privateers, that the better teeling of to-day calls pirates, which raked British commerce to the value of millions into this port, but the sloop Wasp, which lougtl; as fiercely as her namesake fights, in three months capturing thirteen mer- chantmen, engaging four ships-of-the-line; and finally, after a bitter struggle, going down with all her men at the guns and all her colors flying. It Is still interesting to read of her exploits, copied in the journal of the old Marine Insur- ance rooms as the news came in day by day, and to fancy the ardor and spirit with which those lines were penned by hands long since ashes; ardor and spirit universally shared, since, before that brief career of valor, NeW- buryport had on the 31st of May, anticipated the Declaration of Independence, published on the 19th of July following, by instructing the Congress at Philadelphia that, if tht Colonies should be. declared independent, "this town will, with their hves and fortunes, support them in the measure." Here, too, was built the first ship that ever displayed our flag upon the Thames, a broom at her peak that day, after Van Tromp's fashion, to tell the story of how she had swept the seas. Nor is the town unfa- miliar with such daring deeds as that done, during the Revolution, when a British trans- port of four guns was observed in the bay veer- ing and tacking to and Iro through the log, as if uncertain of her whereabouts, and, surmising that she supposed herself in Boston Bay, Cap- tain Offin Boardman, with his men, went off in a whaleboat and offered his services to pilot her in, the offer being of course accepted, the ship hove toa C 'ptain Offin Boardman presently standintg on 'the quarter-deck exchanging the usual greeting with the master of the trans- port while his companions mounted to his side; that done, he suddenly turned and ordered the British flag to be struck, his order was exe- cuted, and, wholly overpowered in their sur- prise, thd crew and the transport were safely carried over the bar and moored at the wharves In Newhuryport. Indeed, her history declares the place to have been in other respects far in advance of many of her contemporaries; she had, not only the first of our ships upon tile "hames, but the first ch in-bridge in America, as well as the first toll-bridge, initiated the first insurance company. had the first incorporated woolen mill, the first incorporated academy. the first female high school, two of the first members of the Anti-Slavery Society, which numbered twelve in all, the first volunteer company for the Revolution, the first volunteer company against the Rebellion, the first bishop, and the first graduate of Harvard-the last at a time when sundry students guilty of misde. meanors were publicly whipped by the presi- dent, a punishment, whether unfortunately or otherwise, now out of date in that institution, to which Newhuryport has given some presidents and many professors. Washington, Lafayette, Talleyrand, have all made some spot in the town famous, one living here, one being enter- tatned here, and one performing his great sleep- ing-act in a bed in the old Pnnce House. From here Brlssot went back to France to die on the scaffold of the Girondists. Here Whitefield died and lies entombed. Here Parson Milton, that son of thunder, used to make his evening family prayer a pattern for preachers: "O Lord! keep us this night from the assassin, the incendiary, and the devil, for Christ's sake, amen." Here the weighty jurist Theophilus Parsonis was born and bred; here John Quincy Adams and Rufuls King studied law; here Cushing rose, and Garrison, and Gough; here the ereat giver George Peabody once dwelt and often came; here John Plerrepoint wrote his best verses; here the artist Bricher first found inspiration; here Harriet Livermore, that ardent missionary of the East whom "Snow- bound " celebrates, was born; here the Lowells sprung; hardly more than a gunshot off, on one side, is the ancestral home of the Longfel- ows, and, on the other, Whittier lives and sings. Here, also, has been the home of vari- ous inventors of renown; the compressibility of water was here discovered ; here steel en- graving by a simple and beautiful process was inventhd; here the machine for making nails, which had previously been painfully hammered out one by one; here an instrument for mea- suring the speed with which a ship goes through the sea, and here a new span for timber bridges, used now on most of our larger rivers. bridging the Merrimack[, Kenneb-c, Connecticut, and Schuylkill ; almost every mechanic, indeed, has some fancy on which he spends his leisure, one amusing himself with making the delicate cal- culations necessary, and then just as delicately burnishing brazen reflectors for telescopes, be- fore his heart was broken by those refractors with which Safford and Tuttle (both connected with. the town) have swept the sky; another occupying himself, to the neglect of btusiness, with the model of a machine in which all his soul was rapt, and which, unknown to him, an ancient had invented a couple of thousand years ago, while others are blusy with the more usefill Lw-water reporters, and with those improvements in the manufacture of tobacco which have all sprtng from a son of the town. It is in mechanics that Newhury- port has always excelled ; her shipyards once lined all the water-side there; shortly after The Revolution, wishing to export lumber, and having but few ships, she bound the lumber together in firm rafts, with a cavity in the centre for provisions and possible shelter. and furnishing them with secure though rude sail- ing apparatus, consigned them to the winds and waves, and after voyages of twenty-six dais they were registered in their ports on the other side of the Atlantic; but before that experiment her ships were, and they still are, models to the whole world, for here were launched those fleetest clippers that ever cut the wave, the Dreadnatught and the Racer.. They go out, but they never come back ; great East Indlamen no longer ride at anchor in her offlng as they used to do ; the bar of the Merri- mack, which once In about a hundred years accumulates into'such an insuperable obstacle that the waters find a new channel, is a foe they do not care to face when once ploted safely over its white line; and, though many things have been done with piers, and buoys, and a breakwater built by Government and crushed like a toy by the next storm, it still binds-its spell about Newhuryport commerce. Possibly if; by any other magic, the town could ever grow sufficiently to require the filling up of the flats, then the stream, inclosed in a narrower and deeper channel, would find suff-clent force to drive before it the envious sands which now the Cape Ann currents sweep into its mouth. Nevertheless, the bar alone is not adequate to account for the financial misfort nes of the town; ships go up to New Orleans over much more dangerous waters; and the Embargo of the early part of the century bears by far the greater responsibility. Then the great hulks rotted at the wharves unused, with -,ar-barrels, which the angry sailors called Madison's Night- caps, inverted over the topmasts to save the rigging, while their crews patrolled the streets In riotous and hungry bands, and observed the first anniversary of the Embargo Act with toll- ing bells, minute-gans, flags at half-mast, and a procession with muffled drums aad crapes. Perhaps it was owing to this state of feeling in the town that the old slanders of her showing blue-lights to the befogged enemy arose. To- gether with the Embargo came the Great Fire; every wooden town has suffered a conflagra- tion, and Newhuryport has always been a prey to the incendiary.; but her celebrated fire broke out on a spring night some sixty years ago, I when nearly every one was wrapped in the I first slumber, and spread with the speed of the lightnings over a track of more thm sixteen I acres, in the most compact and wtealthy portion of the town. Such an immense property was destroyed that the whole place was impover- Ished; many amilies were totally beggared; people hurried to the scene from a dozen miles away; women passed the buckets in the ranks, and helpless crowds swung -o and fro i in the thoroughfares. The spectacle is de- scribed by an old chronicle as having been terribly sublime; the wind, changing, blew t strongly, and drove the flames in fresh direc- . tions, where they leaped in awful col mns high a into the air, and stretched a sheet of fire from a street to street; the moon became obscured in c the muiky atmosphere that hung above the e town, but the town itself was lighted as bril- liantly as by day, and the heat rrelted the k glass in the windows of houses not .estroyed; f while the crash of falling walls, the roaring of n chimneys like distant thunder. the volumes of flames wallowing upward from the ruins and i filling the air with a shower of fire into which o the birds fluttered and dropped, the weird re- ti flection- in- the river, the lowing of the cattle, c the cries of distress tfrom the people, made the b scene cruelly memorable; and though after- p ward that portion of the town w&s rebuilt a with brick, Newhuryport never recovered from w the shock and loss. Some years subsequently A a boy of seventeen was convicted 0o another p arson, and in spite of much exertion to the u contrary, expiated the penalty of the .aw. But tt tt a flaming Nemesis fenll upon the town, perhaps r for having allowed the boy's execution, and - ever since that time other- incendiarles, emu- s lous of his example, have constantly made it a their victim; one, in particular, being- so fre- quent in his attemptse that on a windy or r stormy night the blaze was so sure to burst 9 forth that the citizens could not sleep in their t beds; he appeared to be the subiect of a mania I for burning churches, almost all of the sixteen in town having been fired, sometimes two to- gether, and on several occasion i successfully; r and no dweller in Newhuryport will easily for- ) get the night on which the old North Church rwas burned, when every flake of the wild snow- storm seemed to be a s,Hark of fire, and more r than one superstitious wretch, plunging out into the gale, could find no centre to the unl- versal glare, and shuddered with fright in belief that the Day of Judgment had come at last. But' one extraordinary thing or another Is always-happening in Newhuryport; if it is not a fire, it is a gale; and If it is not a gale, it is an earthquake. The situation of the town is very fine. As you approabh it by land, bleak fields and lichened boulders warn you of the inhospitable sea-coast; but once past their bar- rier, and you are in the midst of gardens. The town lies on a gentle hillside. with such slope and gravelly bottom that an hour after the heaviest rains its streets afford good walking. Beriind it lies an excellent glacial moraine and a champaign country, shut in by low hills, and once, most probably, the bed of the river. Its adjacent territory is netted in rivers and rivu- lets; the broad Merrimack, with its weird and strange estuary, imprisoned by Plum Island; the Artichoke, a succession of pools tying in soft, semi-shadows beneath the overhanging growth of beech and oak, and feathery elms lighting the darker masses, each pool enfolded in such wl e that one sees no outlet, but slides along with the slow tide, lifts a bough, and slips into the next, where some white-etemmed birch perhaps sends a perpetual rustle through the slumberous air, a wild grape-vine climbs from branch to branch, or an early reddening tupelo shakes its gay mantle in the qcattered sun, and with its reflex in the dark trans- parency, wakens one from half the sleepy spell of tLe enchantment there; these streams, with the Quascacucquen or Parker, the Little, Pow- wow, Back, and Rowley rivers, with their slender, but foaming black and white affluents, all make it a place of meadows; and he who desires to see a meadow in perfection, full of emerald and golden tints, and claret shadows, withdrawing into distance till lost in the spar- kle of the sea, must seek it nere, where Heade found material for his exquisite and dainty marsh and meadow views. The scenery around the town, it may thus be imag1ined, is something of unusual beauty; on one side are to be had the deciduous woods of the Stackyard Gate, where the carriage-wheels crackle through winding miles of fragrant brake and fern, and on the other the stately pines and hemlocks of Follymill. the air sweet as an orange-grove with resinous perfume, while the river-road to Haverhill, with West Amesbury swathed in azure mist upon the op- posite hill, and sapphire reaches of the stream unfolding one after Another, is a series of rap. tures. The people, well acquainted with the page: 28-29[View Page 28-29] beauty thUt Asurronds them, are very fond of their chief river; it Ib the scene of frollcking the summer long, and in winter Its black and ice* edged tides seem to be the only pulses of the frozen. town. To some the life upon this river fs only play, to others It is deadly earnest, for a large portion of those who live along the banks on the Water street, the most picturesque of the highways, are fishermen and their house- holds, familiar with all the dangers of the seas -the babies there rocked in a dory, the men, sooner or later, wrecked upon the Georges; meanwhile the men mackerel all summer down in the Bay of Chaleurs, pilot off and on the coast dark nights and dreary days, run the bar and the breakers with a storm following the keel; many of them, as they advance in life, leave their seafaring and settle down at shoe- making, or buy a plot of land and farm It in an untaught way, but just as many find their last home in a grave rolled between two waves. When a storm comes up, and the fog-banks sweep in from sea, hiding the ray of the twin harbor-lighte, and the rote upon. the beach- which every night is heard through the quiet streets beating like a heart, swells into a sullen and unbroken roar-when the shipyards are afloat, the water running breast-high across the wharves, the angry tides rising knee-deep in the lower lanes, and the spray tossed over the tops of the houses there whose foundations begin to tremble and whose dwellers fly for safety, then the well-sheltered people up In the remo e High street, where nothing is known of the storm but the elms tossing their boughs about, may have sorry fancies of some vessel 'driving on Plum Island, of parting decks and of unpitied cries in the horror of blackness and breaker-may even hear the minute-guns in pauses of the gale; but the stress of weather falls upon the homes and hearts of these watchers on the Water street, for to them each swell and burst of the blast means danger to their own roof and the life snatched from a husband's or a father's lips. Mrs. E. Vale Smith in her history of Newhuryport makes thrilling mention of these storms, with the wrecks of the Primrose, the Pocahontas, the Argus, and others, and every resident of the place has had before his eyes the picture which she draws of " the heavy moaning of the sea- a bark vainly striving to clear the breakers- blinding snow--a slippery deck-- stiff and glazed ropes--hoarse commands that the cruel winds seize and carry far away from the ear of the sailor-a crash of tons of falling water beating in the hatches-shrieks which no man heard, and ghastly corpses on the deceitful, shifting sands, and the great ocean-cemetery still holding in awful silence the lost bodies of the dead." Such things, of course, make the place the home of romance, and Mr. George Lunt, a poet of no mean pretensions and a native' of the town, has' founded his novel of "Eastford" on the incidents its daily life affords Newhuryport has also known the effectsof other convulsions of nature ; a hailstorm, with a deposit twelve inches in depth, is still spoken of there, together with snowtorms tunneled from door to door, a northeaster that blew the spray of the sea a down miles inland and loaded the orchard boughs with salt crystals, wnd whh'lwnds mighty enough to blow down one meeting-house and- to lift another with an the people in it and set it in a different spot- whirlwinds coming a quarter of a century too soon, as, if they had but moved a meeting-house there at a later day, a parish would not have been so divided on the question of location as straightway to become, one-half of them, Epis- copalians for whom Queen Anne endowed a chapel. But worse than whirlwinds, storms, fires, or the devastating yellow-fever that once nearly decimated the place, were the earth- quakes that for more than a hundred years, at one period, held high carnival there, and are still occasionally felt. The first of these oc- curred in 1638, on the noon of a summer day, as the colonists, assembled in town-meeting, were discussing their unfledged affairs. We can well imagine their consternation, just three years established, their houses built, woods felled, fields largely cleared, and the June corn just greenly springing up, to find that their en- campment on this spot, So rich in soil, so con- venient to the sea, so well guarded from the Indian, had left them the prey to an enemy whose terrors were so much worse than all others in the degree in which they partook of the dark, unknown, and infinite; It Was not long before another earthquake followed the first, its trembling and vibration and sudden shocks preceded, as that had been, by a roar like the bursting of great guns, while birds for- sook their nests, dogs howled, and the whole brute creation manifested the extreme of terror; by-and-by there came one that lasted a week, with six or eight shocks a day, then one where the shocks were repeated for half an hour with- out any cessation, and presently others where the ground opened and left fissures a foot in width, where sailors on the coast supposed their vessels to have struck, the sea roared and swelled, flashes ot fire ran along the ground, amazing noises were heard like peals and claps of thunder, walls and chimneys fell, cellars opened, floating islands were formed, springs were made dry in one site and burst out in an- other, and tons of fine white sand were thrown up, which, being cast upon the coals, burnt like brimstone. Various causes have been assigned to these earthquakes, not the least absurd of which was the supposition of a cave reaching from the sea to the headwaters of the Merrl- mack, filled with gases, into which the high tides rushing made the occurrence of the phenomena ; but as they have always appeared in connection with more tremendous disturb- ances in other parts of the world, it is probable that they are but the same pulsations of the old earth's arteries, felt in Vesuvius or Peru with more terrible effect. Although there have been more than two hundred of thiese convul- sions, nobody was ever seriously injured by their means, and so used to them did the peo- ple become, that finally they are spoken of in. their records merely as "Lthe earthquake," as one would speak of any natural event, of the tide or ot the moon. For the last century, however, their outhursts have been of very in- frequent occurrence, and have nowise marred the repose of the sweet old place, which now and then awakens to storm or fever sufficient to prevent stagnation, but for the most parr slumbers on serenely by its riverside, the ideal of a large and ancient country-town, peaceful *enough, ancdt almost be-autltl enough, for Par- adise. DOVER. A DOZEN miles above Portsmouth lies the old town of Dover, on the route to the White Mountains, which hills, as it has beer said, were first explored by a party from the place, and always previously believed (both by the Indians and many of the settlers) to be taunted by powerful and splendid spirits. Dover is the old- est town in the State, and though Portsmouth may have the first church-organ, Doyer has the honor of having possessed the flrst church- edifice, strongly palisaded in the days of primi- tive worship there. This town is tne Cocheco of the early settlers, and is situated upon a stream of that name, a branch of the Pisca- taqua, which by its cascades-oneof more than thirty-two feet-offered good opportunity of mill-sites to the first fellers of the forest, allow- ing them to clear their ground and manufacture their lumber at once. Of these opportunities later generations have not been slow to take advantage, and the flow of water now turns the ponderous machinery of multitudes of looms, the yards of whose manufacture are numbered only by millions, while an enormous backwater \exists in the reserve of the neighboring town of Strafford, sufficient at any time to drown out a drouth. Of all the manufacturing towns of New Eng- land, Dover Is one of the most picturesque, and, from some of the loftier points within its limits, meadow, lake, river and phantom mountain-ranges combine to make a varied view of pastoral beauty. But there are other views to the full as interesting for the lover of i humanity, when at night all the mill-windows ( blaze out and are repeated In the river, or i when at noon the thousands of operatives pour forth from the factory-gates, and b sy Peace 1 seems half disguised. Still it is Peace, and i Prosperity beside her; and much it would a amaze some ghost of the dead and gone could f he, without losing his thin and impalpable v essence altogether, obtain a noonday glimpse C of the scene of his old troubles. For the place p has not been in the past a haunt of Peace-from b the time, during the last war with England, I when the ships, kept from going to sea by the E American powers, were drawn up the river to 3 Dover lest they should be destroyed at the t wharves of Portsmouth by the British powers, to the time, a hundred and seventy-tve years t Ibefore, when the followers of Mrs. Ann 1 eatch. inson, with their Antinomian heresies, stirred up sedition among a people for whose preserva- tion from English tyranny on the one hand, and Indian cruelty on the other, perfect unan- imity of heart and mind was necessary--.with all the troubles iH the meantime occasioned by Mason, who made claim, by royal grant, to the land the- settlers had purchased of the Aborigines and all the troubles with the Abori- gines themselves. Dover is more peculiarly the scene of the old Indian outrages than any other New England town can be considered, inasmuch qs it was not only there that the famous Waldron Massacre occurred, but the place was also the stage of most of the events that, during a dozen years, led up to that terrific night's work, and that constitute a bit of interesting history never faithfully written out, and which now probably never will be, several of the links being lost, and remaining only to be conjectured from their probabilities. In 1640 there were four distinct settlements on the Piscataqua and its confluent streams; but each having an individual and voluntary management, and all of them being too much divided in opinion to establish a government of mutual concessions among themselves, and hope of any protection from the King, then in sorry plight himself, being out of the question, the four settlements agreed in one thing, and unanimously requested permission to come under the jurisdiction of the Massachusetts Colony-a request very gladly granted, as, while reserving rights of property to- the owners, it afforded that Colony better oppor- tunityto establish the boundaries, three miles north of the Merrimack and any branch thereof, which she had always claimed ; and in return for this opportunity she allowed depttltes who were not Church-memners to sit in the General Court-a privilege she had not given her own people, but which was perhaps necessary where but few, as in New Hampshire, were of the Puritan persuasion. Under this arrangement, Richard Waldrone was for more than twenty years a deputy, and several years Speaker of the Assembly; he was also a Justice, and the Sergeant-Major of the Militia in that part of the country; and when the connectio with page: 30-31[View Page 30-31] Massachusetts had been severed. be was, for a D time, the Chief Magistrate of the Province. v He had married In England and, being a il person of some wealth, on his arrival'here he a had bought large tracts of land, received large a grants for Improvement, had built the first & saw-mill on the Cocheco, followed it with t otherh, and established a trading-post with the I Indians. He was evidently a man of remark- t able character, respected by his neighbors I for his uprightness, and everywhere for his ] ability. i Whatever he did was done with a will ; as a 4 magistrate he persecuted the Quakers to the a extent of the law, though he was known to shed tears when passing sentence of death p upon an offender; as a landlord he fought the 1 claims of Mason and his minions persistently, I being thrice suspended from the Council, and ] twice sentenced to fines which he paid only after an arrest of his body-; while as a soldier he was no less zealous in behalf of the public interest thah in private capacity he had proved himself in behalf of his own. He appears to have exercised a certain fascination on the Indians of the locality, being able for many years to do with them as he would, and Cocheco having long been spared by them when the war-whoop resounded over almost every other settlement in the land-a circumstance aptly illustrating the adage that things are what you make them, since, so long as the Indians were treated like brothers, they fulfilled the law ot : love, in rude but faith ml manner; but once trapped like wild beasts, and wild beasts they became. - These Indians were chiefly the Pennacooks. a tribe belonging to the region of the Merri- mack and its tributaries, who traded their pelts at Waldron's post for ammunition, blan- kets, fineries, and such articles as they were allowed to have, and who on more than one occasion showed their capability for gratitude. just as strongly as they subsequently showed It for revenge. They sometimes took advantage of Waldron's absence to procure from his part- ner- the liquor which he would -not sell to them; but in the main they seemed to have a wholesome fear of him, not unmixed with affection and trust in his bonor. This'tr be had been almost annihilated by the Molawks, or Men-eaters, of whbm they entertained a deadly terror, and by an ensuing pestilence,; and being once accused of unfriendly int n- tions. by messengers sent from the settlements, they did not scruple to disarm suspicion by be- traying their own weakness, and averring that they consisted of only twenty-four warriors, with their squaws and pappooses; while their wise old sachem, Passaconaway, whose people believed that he could make water burn, raise a green leaf from the ashes of a dry one, and umetamorphose hlmself into a living flame, had early seen the futility of attempts upon the English, had always advised his subjects to peace, and lad imbued his son, Wonnelancet, so strongly with his opinions, that the latter never varied his rule ifrom that which his father's had been. When the war with King Philip of the Wampanoaga broke out, a body of soldiery was sent to the Pennacooks to as- certain the part they intended to play; but seeing so large a company approaching, the Indians, who bad had no idea of joining the war, concealed theunselves; upon which, in mere wantonness, the soldiery burned their wigwams and provisions. Instead of reveng- ing this injury; they only withdrew further away. to the headwaters of the Connecticut, and passed a quiet winter in their usual pur. suits. In the meanwhile, however, the other tribes-Tarratines, Ossipees, and Pequawkets- became restless, and presently commenced hos- tilities upon the outlying points; and Fal- mouth, Saco, Scarborough, Wells, Woolwich, Kittery, Durham, Salmon Falls, and other spots, were red with slaughlters, and in three months eighty men were killed between the Piscataqua and the Kennebec. With the winter there came a tremendous fall of snow, and that, to- gether with the severity o0 the season and the famine that distressed them, occasioned these Indians to sue flor peace; and, coming to Major Waldron, they expressed sorrow for their conduct, and made repeated promises of better behavior for the future. But, this being done, the survivors among King Philip's men, who, at his death, feating total extirpation, had fled from their own forests and dlsseml. nated themselves among the northern tribes, inflamed them anew with memory of wrong and outrage, endured doubtless, as well as com- mitted, and the hostilities began again by a de- monstration at Falmouth, and were continued, the savages burning, the homesteads as the dwellers abandoned them. till between Casco Bay and the Penobscot not a single English settlement was left. At this time, the Penna- cooks, who had not been concerned in the butcheries at all4 seem to have been used by Major Waldron to secure a peace which he almost despaired of obtaining in any other way ; and it was through their agency, it may be supposed, that some four hundred of the Eastern Indians, of all tribes, with their women and children, assembled in Cocheco, on the 6th of September, 1676, to sign a full treaty of peace with Major Waldron, whom, the his- torian Belknap says, they looked upon as a friend and father. At this instant a body of soldiery, that had been dispatched to the northward, with orders to report to Major Waldron, the various settle- ments on theii way being directed to reinforce them as they might be able, arnved at Cocheco; and, obediently to the instructions which they Lbrought, Major Waldron had no choice but to ; surround and seize the whole four hundred of, the confidiDg Indians. To Major Waldron this must have been an -exceedingly trying moment: his plighted word, t his honor, his friendship for this poor people whom he knew so well, all his sentiments as a rman and a Christian, must have drawn him one way, while his duty as a soldier compelled him the other. To resign his command in the face i of the enemy and under such instructions I would doubtless have Involved him in most 8 serious difficulties; to disobey these instruc- ) tions imposed upon him a too fearful responsi- ; bility in case of future depredations by those r whom he should hare spared against his or- 8 ders ; he was a soldier, and his first duty was i obedience; and, for the rest, the young cap- y tains of the force sent by the Governor were ' on fire with eagerness, and it was with diffi- t culty he could restrain their martial spirit B while he took counsel with himself. In this e strait the Major unfortunately thought of a a stratagem that umight be used, and having, It is paid, assured the Indians, who had been a little alarmed by the arrival of the soldiery, that they had nothing to apprehend, he proposed to them a sham fight with powder, but w thout balls,. and on the signal of the discharge of their guns --making that a pretext for considering that the Indians had violated the understanding- the soldiery surrounded them, by an artful mili- tary movement, and with one or two exceptions made prisoners of the whole body. One of these exceptions was a young Indian who, escaping, sought and found refuge with Mrs. Elizatheth Heard, and in his thankfulness pro- mised het a recompense of future safety, and one da. redeemed the pledge. Although the Pennacooks were immediately separated from the other prisoners and dis- charged, upon which Major Waldron had per- haps relied for his own .exculpatiorL with them, and only half of the whole number were sent to Boston, where some six or eigh, being con- victed'of old murders, were hanged, and the rest sold into foreign slavery, yet they, together with all other Indians both far and near, re- garded it as a treachery upon Major Waldron's part that absolved them from all ties and de- 'manded a bitter reparation. It s said that there is no sufficient evidence of ,heir having been invited to treat for more definite peace, and that they had no guarantee of protection in their assemblage at Cocheco; but the mere tact of their. quiet presence in that nunber, an un- usual if not unprecedented thing with them, implies that the occasion was a special one, and that they must have had Major Waldron's verbal promise of safety at least, wille, if it had been otherwise, it would have been absurd and impossithle for them to regard the affair as so signal and abominable a treachery of his, worthy to be remembered with such undying hatred andtexpiated in his own herson with such torture. This view of the facts is forti- fied, moreover, by the subsequent a ction of the Pennacooks. That they should have fancied themselves so peculiarly aggrieved as they did, should so long in all their wanderings have cherished their rancor, and should it last have executed vengeance through their own tribe, In itself testifies sufficiently that they had been used by Major Waldron. to allure tVe other In- dians into the treaty under promises of protec- tion, and felt the course which they pursued to be a necessary vindication of the r honor as well as a gratification of their passions. They were not, however, in any situation to pay their debt at once, and on being set at liberty they withdrew to their hunting-grounds, and as season after season rolled away had apparently forgotten all about it. A grandson of old Passaconaway at last ruled t iem-Kan- camagus, sometimes called Jolmhn Hagkins. He was a chief of different spirit from the previous sachems, and the injuries his people had re- ceived from the English rankled In Ais remem- brance; his thinned and suffering tribe, his stolen lands, his old wrongs, were perpetual stings; and when finally the English, dispatch- ing emissaries to the Mohawks, engaged their co-operation against the Eastern Indians, no. thing but impotence restrained his wrath. It is possible that even then, by reason of his dis- tresses, he might have been appeased, if the En ,usih could ever have been brought to con- sider that the Indian's nature was hluman nature, and to treat him with auything but violence when he was strong and contempt when he was weak. Several letters which Kancamagus sent to the Governor of New Hampshire, and which are curiosities, are ad- duced to prove his amenable disposition at this time: "MAY 15th, 1685. "Honor Governor my friend You my friend. I desire your worship and your power, because I hope you can do some great matters-this one. I am poor and naked and I have no men at my place because I afraid allways Mohogs he will kill me every day and night. If your wor- ship when please pray help me you no let Mohogs kill me at my place at Malamake Rever called Panltkkog and Natukkog, I will submit your wors1ip and your power.-And now I want pouder and such alminishun, shatt and auns, because I have forth at my home and I plant theare. "This all Indian hand, but pray you do con- sider 'your humble servant, JOHN HAUKINS." This letter was written for Kancamalis by an Indian teacher, who signed it, together with King Hary, Old Robin, Mr. Jorge Rodunno- nukgus, and some dozen othlers, bv making their respective marks. The next letter is a much more complicated affair in style; it is dated on the same day. "Honor Mr. Governor: "4 Now tills day I com your house, I want se you, and I bring my hand at before you I want shake hand to you if your worship when please then you receive my lband then shake your hand and my hand. You my friend because I remember at old time when live my grant father and grant mother then Englishmen comrn this country, then my grant father and English- men they make a good govenant, they fiend allwayes, my grant father leving at place called Malamake Rever, other name chef Natukkog and Panukkog, that one rever great many names, and* I bring you this few skins at this first time I will give you my friend. This all Indian hand. JOHN HAWKINS, Sagamore." These letters winning no notice from the contemptuous official, on the same day were followed by another: "Please your Worship-I will intreat you matther, you my friend now ; this, if my Indian he do you long, pray you no put your law, be. 'cause som my Indians fooll, some men much love drunk then he no know what he do, maybe he do mischif when he drunk, if so pray you must let me know what he done because I will ponis him what have done, you, you my friend, if you desire my businmss then sent me I will help you if I can. Mr. JOHN HOGKINS." None of these letters having produced any effect, the sachem abandoned the one-sided cor- respondence, and on the next morning indited another epistle to Mr. Mason, the claimant of the Province. "Mr. Mason- Pray I want speake you a few words if your worship when please, because I. com parfas. I will- speake this governor but he go away so he say at' last night, and so far I understand this governor his power that your power now so he speak his own mouth. Pray il you take what I want pray come to me because I want go hom at this day. "Your hunmble servant, JoHsN Hq^OTNS, Indian Sogmon." page: 32-33[View Page 32-33] There was snmething tonci ing in these let- terp, to any but an early settler; but appa- rently they were quite disregarded, and Kan- , eamagus had' every right to feel ill-used by the neglect which his petition for protection from the Mohawks met, and it is probable that this waiting at rich men's gates only deepened the old grudge. At the close of the summer various affronts were put upon the settlers at Saco, and their dogs were killed; alter which the Indians gathered thleix own corn and re- moved their families to some unknown place. -This resembling a warlike menace, messengers were sent, to discover Its meaning, who were informed that the Pennaeooks had receivred threats from the Mohawks, and had withdrawn from the settlements that the English might not suffer on their account-far too plausible a reply and too magnanimous action for the truth. But an agreement of friendship was then made, and was signed, among the rest, by Kancamagus and another chief named Mesandouit. Kancamagus bad no intention of making this anything but a brief truce, and he improved the time to gather around h1imself the little band of the sullen Pennacooks, and to strike hands with the Pequawkets, and the rem- nant of the more northerly tribes, while several of the Strange Indians, who were among the four hundred prisoners of that 6th of Sep- tember, escaped from their slavery, returned to New England, found their way to the haunts of the Pennacooks and Ossipees, and with the recital of their sufferings assisted him in fan- ning the steadily smoldering fires of hate to a fiury against their betrayer on that unforgotten day. Nor had Major Waldron endeavored at all to pacify the Indians, in the meantime. His prominent position alone would have kejit his great misdeed fresh in their remembrance, even without his accustomed hot-headed en- ergy of action: No little act of his that could embitter one savage remained untold by an- other; they fancied deceit in all his dealings now, and used to tell that in buying their peltry he would say his own hand weighed a pound, and would lay it on the other scale. He had been in command, too, on a frontier expedition, -where, a conference being held with arms laid aside, Waldron, suspecting foul play, seized the point of a lance which he espied hid be; neath a board, and, drawing it forth, advanced brandishing it toward the other party, who had probably concealed it there to be used only in case of a second act of treachery on his own part, and the conference broke up in a skirmish, in which several of the Indians, including a powerful chieftain, were killed, a canoe-full drowned, and five' were captured, together with a thousand pounds of dried beef -and another mark was made on the great score which at some time the Indians meant to cross out. Sir Edmund Andros was the Governor of New England now, and in the spring of 1688, fired with ambitious projects or with cupidity, he sailed down the coast in a man-of-war, and failing to achieve any other doughty action, plundered, in the absence of its master, the house of the Baron de St. Castine, a French officer, who had married the daughter of the great Tarratine chief, Modokawando. Castine, buruilg with indignatlon, immediately used all- his influence, and It was great, to excite the Indians to avenge the injury and insult; and from unheeded complaints that their fisheries were obstructed, their corn devoured by cattle, their lands patented without consent, and their trading 'accounts tampered with, they pro- ceeded to reprisal, and the old difficulties broke out afresh. They were all at an end, however, before the next summer. The crops were in. the Indians went peaceably to and fro through the settlements, their wrongs seemed to be righted, their wounds to be healed; thir- teen years had elapsed since the capture of the four hundred, the settlers no longer re- membered It, the Indians themselves never made allusion to it; Waldron, now nearly eighly years old, but full of vigor, relied securely on his power over the savages, his acquaintance with their character, and his long-acknowledged superiority; the village, with its five garrison-houses, into which the neighboring families withdrew at night, but kept no watch, feeling safe behind the bolted gates of the great timber walls, reposed in an atmosphere of tranquillity and contentment, and no one suspected any guile. It was while affairs were in this comfort- able condition that, on the 27th of June, 1689, the Indians were observed rambling through the town, on one errand and another, in far more frequent numbers than usual or than seemed necessary for trade. Many strange laces were among them; and it was noticed that their sidelong glances scrutinized the de- fenses very closely. To more than one house- wife a kindly squaw muttered hints of mischief, but so darkly as to give only a vague sense of danger. As night drew near, one 'or two of the people, a little alarmed, whispered to Major Waldron a fear that evil was in the air. Waldron laughed at them, told them to go and plant their pumpkins, and he would let them know when .the Indians were going to break out; and being warned again at a later hour by a young man, who assured him there was great uneasiness in the settlement, he said he knew the Indians perfectly, and there was not the least occasion for concprn. That night the sachem, Mesandouit, was hospitably enter- tained at Waldron's table. "l Brother Waldron,'! said he, i' what would you do if the Strange Indians were to come now?" and Waldron carelessly answered that he could assemble a hundred men by the lifting of his finger. It is hot said whether Mesandouit remained in the garrison-house or not; but on the same even- ing a couple of squaws' requested a night's lodging on the hearth, telling the Major that a company of Indians were encamped a few miles off, who were coming to trade their beaver on the next day. Several of the house- hold objected to the society of the squaws that night, but it being dull weather, Waldron com- passionately said, "'Let the poor creatures lodge by the fire ;" and by-and-by, in total un- suspicion, setting no watch, and thinking no harm, the family retired to bed, while at three of the remaining garrison-houses other squaws had obtained entrance and shelter on a similar pretense. Five days before, Major Hinchman, of Chelms- ford, having beard from two friendly Indians a strange story of hostile intentions against Cocheco, had dispatched an urgent letter to ihe Governor acquainting him with the rumor. At the same time, he wrote to Mr. Danforth of the Council, and Mr. Danforth ins-antly for- warded the letter, and begged the Governor to lose no time, but to send to Cocheco "4 on pur- pose rather than not at all;" yet for some unexplained reason-whether the Governor re- garded the rumor as idle, or could 4o nothing till his Council could be gathered- although. Major Hinchman's letter was dated on the 22d of June--it was not till the 27t0 that any attempt was made to apprise Waldtro -of his danger. "BosToN, 27th Jure, 1689. "HONORABLE SIR-The Governor and Council having this day received a letter from Major HIinchman. of Chelmsford, that some Indians are come into them, who report that there is a gathering of Indians in or about Pennacook, with design of mischief to the English. Among the said Indians one Hawklns is said'to be a principal designer, and that they have a par- ticlular design against yourself and Mr. Peter Coffin, which the Council thought it necessary presently to dispatch advice thereof, to give you notice, that you take care of your own safe- guard, they intending to endeavor to betray you on a pretension of trade. "Please forthwith to signify the imnort hereof 'to Mr. Coffin and others, as you shall think ne cessary, and advise of what information you may at any time receive of the Indians' motions. "By order in Council, is ISA. ADDINGTON', ec'y. "To Major Richard Waldron and Mr. Peter Coffin, or either of them, at Coeheco; these with all possible speed." "THE INDIANS SBOLE OFF IN Tl B MORNINQ AND LErT ! LFM T BRANDDAu(a]JsK OF MAJOR WALDbROf SCOV*.ED BY TE BSNOW AION IN THB OHB W WOODS WITI Tr ILD BEATS WAND HNe ,! page: 34-35[View Page 34-35] The speed, however, came too late. When Mr. Weare, the bearer of this agitated and ill- written letter, on the night of its date reached Newhury, a freshet had swollen the stream so that It was impassable; and while he was r-d- Ing up and down the bank the squaws had been admitted into the garrison-houses and had stretched themselves before the fires. These squaws had asked in an incidental way to be told how to go out if they should wish to leave the place after the others were asleep, and had willingly been shown the way; and accordingly in the dead of the night, noiselessly as the com- ing of darkness itself, the bolts were withdrawn by them, and a low whistle crept out into the thickets and the ambush of the river-banks, and soundinhg their dreadful war-whoop in re- ply, the Indians leaped within the gates. The squaws, who had faithfully informed themselves, hurriedly signified the number of people in each apartment. and the invaders divided in every direction, and missed none of those they sought. Waldron himself lodged in an inner room, and, wakened by the noise, he leaped out of bed crying, "What now I what now 1" and, seizing only his sword, met the Indians, and, old as he was, with his white wrath blazing loftily over the fierce devils, he drove them before him from door to door till he had passed the third. As he sprung back then for other weapons, the Indians rushed up behind him and stunned him with their hatchets, -felled him, and dragged him to the hall, where they seated him in an armchair placed on the top of a table, and, tauntingly asking him, "Who shall judge In- dians now?"7 left him to recover his senses while they compelled such of the family as they had spared to prepare them some food. Their hunger being appeased, they returned to Major Waldron, had his books, in which their trade had been registered, brought forth, and as each Indian's turn came, he stepped up, crying, "I cross out my account!' and with his knife drew a deep gash across the breast of the old hero. Tradition adds that, cutting off the hand whose weight they had so often felt, they tossed it into the scales to discover for themselves if indeed it weighed a pound, and were struck with con. sternation on finding that it did. It Is not re- corded that Waldron uttered a cry of pain or an entreaty for their mercy. 4 Oil, Lord P" he said, " oh, Lord!" and, spent with anguish and loss of blood from the shocking mutilation to which he was further subjected, he fell forward on his sword, which one of the tormentors held reaedy to receive him, and the vengeance that had brooded and waited thirteen years was sat- isfied. That night Mrs. Elizabeth Heard, coming up the river with her sons, from Strawherry Bank, was alarmed by the turmoil and the light, and sought protection at Waldron's garrison; but, discovering the terrible state of things there, Mrs Heard was so prostrated that she had no power to fly, and her children were obliged to leave her-though it would seem as if the three sons might, at least, have dragged her into the shelter of the bushes, where afterward she contrived to crawl. With the daylight an In- dian got a glimpse of her. and hastened to part the bushes, pistol in hand, but, looking at her an instant, turned about and left her; he had taken only a stride away when, as if a doubt crossed his mind, he came back, gave her an- other glance, and with a yell departed. It was probably the Indian whom she had protected on the day of which this day was the result. fMrs. Heard's own garrison had been saved by the barking of a dog, which wakening William Wentworth-the ancestor of all the Went. worths in this country-he pushed the door to, and, throwing himself on his back, held it with his feet till assistance came, various bullets piercing the oak meanwhile, but missing its valiant and determined old defender. But in two other garrisons the Indians had worked their bloody will; and, having been refused en- trance into that of Mr. Cofflin's son, they brought out the father, captured at an earlier hour, and threatened the old man's murder before the son's eyes, upon which he also sur- rendered; but while the house was being plundered, all the Coffins escaped together. After this, setting fire to the mills and houses, the Indians, having killed twenty-two persons and made prisoners of twenty-nine, retreated by the light of the blaze, so rapily as to be be- yond danger before any of the other settlers were aroused to a sense of what had -been done. But in their flight the Indians inaugurated a system -that for years continued to plague the settlers-alleviate, though it did, the previous horrors of Indian warfare-and, sparing the lives of their prisoners, they sold them to the French. Among the captives of that night was a little granddaughter of Major Waldron's, who, having been sent by the Indians, while 'at their dark work in the garrison-house,to bid forth those hiding in another room, had crept into a bed and drawn the clothes about her; she had been found again, though, and had been forced to undertake the march with them, half-clad and on her little bare feet. She was only seven years old, and her trials were bitter. At one time her master made her stand against a tree while he charged his gun and took aim at her; again, an Inldian girl pushed her off a precipice into the river, and, having clambered out, she dared not tell, when ques- tioned, the reason of her being so wet; once the Indians stole off in the morning and left her, covered by the snow, alone in the woods with the wild beasts and hunger, and, tracing them by their foot-prints, the poor little thing went crying after them through the wilder- ness; and at another time, building a great fire, they told her she was to be ro sted, whereupon bursting into tears she ran and threw her arms round her master's neck, begging him to save her, which, on the condition that she would behave well, he promised her to do. Another capture of more subsequent importance was the wife of Richard Otis, the ancestress of Hon. John Wentworth, of IllinoiS, and of Mr. Charles Tuttle, late of the Cambridge Observatory. The unhappy Mrs. Otis had seen her husband killed as he rose In bed, a son share his father's fate, a daughter's brains beaten out against the stairs, and with her little daughter Judith, who was subsequently rescued, and her baby of three months old, she was led up through the White Mountain Notch to Canada. This infant of three months became a persqnage of great interest in her day. Baptized by the French priests and given the name of Christine, and intended by them for conventual life, on reach- ing maturity she declined taking the vail, and was married to a Frenchman by the name of Le Beau. Upon her husband's death an inextinguishable. desire to see her native land took control of her, and not being permitted to carry her children with her, she left them in the hands of -.riends, upon the liberation of prisoners, and at the loss of all her estate, which was not inconsiderable, as s le herself says, Journeyed back to Dover. A few years afterward she' returned to Canada, where she appears to have been greatly valued, made an unsuccessful effort to recover her ch' idren, and again underwent the hardships of tt e perilous pilgrimage home. She must have been a wo- man of rather remarkable nature to prefer the New England wilds with their discomforts to the comparatively sumptuous life of-the French In Canada; but she was still young, aLd whether from pure preference, or because she formed another attachment there at an early date, she remained in New England and marred the ad- venturous Captain Thomas Baker, who had himself been& a captive of the Indians some years previously, and who had accompanied her on the voyage home; and, abjur ng the re- liglon of her baptism, she embraced the Pro- testant faith. Her apogtasy appeared greatly to distress the priest who se especial charge she had been, and more than a dozen years after her return led to quite a controversial tilt be- tween representatives of the two forms of be- lief-Father Seguenot addressing I er a long and affectionate letter, in which he made her and her husband handsome promises if they would go to Montreal, wrought upon her feel- ings in describing the death of her daughter, set forth quite ably the distinctive doctrines of his Church and besought her to return to it: t"Let us add, dear Christine," said he, that the strange land in which you are does not af- ford you the Paschal Lamb, the true and heavenly manna, the bread of ange s; I mean Jesus Chnst contained really wlthilL the holy Eucharist, which is only to be found in the Catholic Church; so that you are in that place, like the prodigal son, reduced to feed on im. proper and insipid food, which cannot give you life, after having fed here on the most exqui- site, most savory, and most delicious food of Heaven-I mean the adorable oody and precious blood of Jesus Christ at the holy sacrament of the altar." By this letter, written in a crabbed and almost illegible hand, but in the language of her childhood and of countless dear associa- tions, Christind seems to have been unshaken, and Governor Burnett made a learned and masterly reply to it, among other things de- claring, in reference to the passage quoted, that the upholders of this interpretation of the Eucharist did, in St. Paul's words, " crucify to themselves the Son of God afresh and put him to an open ,hame." These letters attracted much attention throughout the Colonies, and rendered Christine a person of importance dur- ing all her life of nearly ninety years, and she received many favors and several grants of land' one of five hundred acres under the guardianship of Colonel William Pepperrell. But though the greater part of that long term of life was passed in Dover, it was un- troubled by any foray of the Indians who once had desolated her friends' and lather's dwell- ings. ' For, having glutted their vengeance, the Pennacooks were content to pay the penalty. to fly from t"eir old hunting-grounds, to abau- don their territory and their name, to find re- flnge in Can'ada and lose themselves among the Indians of the St. Francis, and, except when some solitary wanderer roamed alone by the graves of his fathers, the Pennacooks never again were seen on the pleasant bank of the iC winding water "And no one who surveys the busy, bustling town of Dover co-day, would think that less than two hundred years ago It was the scene of such a tragedy as Waldron'i Massacre. page: 36-37[View Page 36-37] PORTSMOUTH. Ar hour aftpr leaving Newhuryport, having crossed th A Merrimack, no longer on the bridge that Blondin refused to walk, the traveler is in Portsmouth, a town which, without possessing the vitality of Newhuryport or the world-known traditions of Salem, is in some regards as inter- esting as either. Few spots in the whole country can boast the primeval grandeur of which it was the possessor, and traces of which are still to be found both in place and people. Being the only seaport of an inde- pendent State-for, before our present confed- eration, New Hampshire was a little Republic, governed by a President and two Houses of Con- gress--much home wealth naturally centred there, much foreign wealth and many dignitaries were drawn there; and -being a provincial cap- ital, for so long a time the home of Presidents and' Governors, and afterward a garrisoned and naval place of the United States, its society has always been of the choicest description, and its homes and habits sumptuous. The greater part of the old families have died out or have left. the place, but many of their dwellings remain to tell of the degree of splendor which charac- terized not only their hospitality, but their common life. w The town lies very prettily upon land between several creeks, just where the Piscataqua widens-to meet the sea three miles below- into a harbor of extraordinary but placid pictur- esqueness. Martin Pring was Its first visitor, and after him John Smith, and it was originally part of the Mason and Gorges grant, although Mason bought out Sir Ferlinando's interest, built a great house, and established the settle- ment here himself, sending from Dover an ex- plor ng party to the White Mountains, or Crystal Hills, as they were then called, in the hope of adding diamond mines to his possessions. In the first days the Central part of the town was known aq Strawherry Bank, and so many an aged resident still speaks of it; and by a singu. lar circumstance it happens that nearly all this portion of Portsmouth, containing public build- ings, banks, offiuces, stores and dwellings, is owned in fee by the old North Chlrch, being some twelve acres in the centre of the city, to- gether with thirty-eight acres through which runs the Islington Road, all of It constituting glebe land leased to the present holders for nine hundred and ninety-nine years, and at the expiration of that little term to fall back wi h all its improvements into the hands' of the Church, if the Church be still in existence-a prospective wealth bearing favorable compari- son with the present wealth of Trinity Church in New York. The place still does a very fair business for one of its size, Portsmouth lawns and hosiery be- ing known the country over, and its principal rope-walk furnishing nearly all the riggfng of the Maine and Massachusetts marine. Many of the well-shaded streets are paved, and there are library and athenaeum, fine schools and churches; among the latter, St. John's, suc- ceeding that to which Caroline, the Queen of George the Second, gave altar and pulpit books, communion service, chancel furniture and a silver christening-basin-a stately and interest- ing edifice, with its mural tablets and the porphyry font taken at the capture of an African city. Although Portsmouth probably shared the prevailing sentiment of New England to some extent, sne was never thoroughly Puritan, having been planted more for mercantile than religious ends, and she is still a young settle- ment when we read of the profane game of shovel-board'being openly played there, and the character of its banqueting and merrymak- ing has at all times more of the Cavalier than the Roundhead. In 1711 she built an almshouse at an expense of nearly four thousand pounds, a thing contrary to the genius of all Puritanism; and to the honor of Portsmouth be it known that this was not only the first almshouse in this country, but in the whole civilized world. It was in Portsmouth, too, that there was made perhaps the earliest attack on African slavery, by a decision of the local court that it-was a thing not So be tolerated, although, having eased their consciences by the declaration and the law--a famous habit not confined to forts- mouth-the good people went on keeping such property in slaves as they chose. The rank of the early population there was of a much higher Spctal type than could be found in other settlements. There were the Parkers, the gravestone of whose ancestress was re. cently uncovered, Lady Zerviah Stanley, who made a love-match and escaped to this country from the wrath of her father, the Earl of Derby. There are the Chaunceys, immigran-X here through the persecutions of Archbmisho Laud, sprung of Chaunceyde Cllauaceyt om Clauncey, near Amlens in France, wloo entered England with the Conqueror; their head in this counLry could trace his noble descent back to Charle- magne, and back to Eghert in the year 800, lineage not excelled by Queen Victorla's own. There were the families of Pepperrell and Went- worth, baroneted for illustrious deeds; and there are to be found the frst mention of the old names of Langdon, Frost, Newmarch, Cush- ing, She..le, Penhallow, names which revive the traditions of a magnificent hospitality. Here was born Tobias Lear, the friend and- secretary of Washington, and his house re- mains to-day u1ll of mementoes of his chief; there lived John Langdon, first President of the United States Senate; the handsome face of "s sII BNG OUT MAIN SAIGNSAL FROM HE WINDOW FoR DTR OOVUBOB TO BEAD UBOSs TB VOPEMS * SPACE Br jciSJSN THElB DWELLINGSu page: 38-39[View Page 38-39] Madame Scott, the widow of John Hancock, has many a time looked out of that window ; there stands the house in which successively lived Jeremiah Mason and Daniel Webster; there the handsome dwelling of Levi Woodbury, and there were born the Blunts, whose charts to- day define the courses of all modern com- merce. Many other mansions of note are still stand- ing. Here on the corner of Daniel and Chapel streets, with Its gambrel-roof and luthern- light,4 is the old Warner House, the first brick house of the place, and whose material was brought from Holland; there are still p eserted in it the gigantic pair of elk-horns presented to the head of the house by the Indians with whom he traded, and who, out of their skillfilly- painted portraits, still look down at the guest who mounts the staircase; there are paintings by Copley hanging In another place within, and on repapering its hall, a lew years since, four coatings of paper being removed, a full-length likenesH of Governor Phipps on his charger was discovered, together with other life-sized fres- coes, of more or less value, of whose existence people of eighty years bad never heard; this house ought to be as secure from the fires-of Heaven as a person vaccinated by Jenner ought to be from disease, for it has a lightning-rod put up under Dr. Franklin's personal inspec- tion, and the first one used in the State. Fire has destr yed the spacious house where, a hun- dred years ago, in the midst of guests assem- bled with all the illumination and cheer of the times, the beautiful Miss Sheale sat in her bridal-dress waiting for the bridegroom who never came, but who left his great wealth, his love, and his good name, left his bride to her destiny of alternating doubt and terror, and disappeared out of the world for ever. This same fire, or another, has left no mark of the house to which High Sheriff Parker once hur- ried so hungrily with Ruth Blay's blood upon his hands-a young girl condemned for murder- ing her chilld, though afterward found to be in- nocnt, and her reprieve sent forward to arrive only tlo minutes too late, for she had been driven to the scaffold, clothed in silk and filling the air with her cries, and hurried out of life before the appointed hour because the sheriff feared lest his dinner should cool by waiting. But there still stands the old "Earl of Halifax" inn, shabby enough now, but once a place of Tory revelry and Rebel riot ; a house that has had famous guests in Its day, for, not to men- tion the platitude of Washington's and Lafay- ette's entertainment, here John Hancock had his headquarters, with Elbridge Gerry, Rut- ledge, and G-neral Knox; here General Sulli- van, President of New Hampshire, convened his council; and here, something later, Louis Philippe and his two brothers of Orleans were cared for. On an island in the harbor, whence is seen the wide view of fort and field and light- house, and the sea stretching away till the Isles of Shoals and Agamenticus lie in the horizon like clouds, stands the old Prescott mansion, where the Legislature was wont to bea enter- tained, but whose wide-doored hospitality has gtven place to that of the State, since it is now another almshouse. In Kittery, a sort of sub- urb of Portsmouth, the garrison-house. two hundred years old, is still shown, and Sir Wil- liam Pepperrell's residence by the water, with its once deer-stocked park and avenues of mighty elms; and, on the other side of the river, in Little Harbor, two miles from the business centre, the old house erected by Gov- ernor Benning Wentworth, but now passed out of the bands of his family, remains to delight tile antiquary. This house, built around three sides of a square, though only two stories in height, contains fifty-two rooms, and looks like an agglomeration of buildings of various dates and styles; in its cellars a troop of horse could be accommodated In time of danger, and here are still kept in order the council-chamber and the billiard-room, with the spinet and buffet and gun-rack of their time, and the halls, fin- ished in oak and exquisitely carved with the year's work of a chisel; are lined with ancient portraits. Here lived and kept a famous table the old Governor Benning Wentworo, as head- strbng and self-willed and passionate as any Wentworth of them all. It is told of him that, when long past his sixtieth year, he lost what was left of his heart to pretty Patty Hilton, his maid-servant; and, assembling a great dinner- party round his bo rd, with the Rev. Arthur Brown, when the walnuts and the wine were on, he rung for Patty, who came and stood blushngly beside him, and then, as Governor of NTew Hampshire, he commanded the clergy- man, who had hesitated at his request as a pri- vate gentleman, to marry him; and Patty straightway became Lady Wentworth, in the parlance of the day, and carried things with a high hand ever afterward, until, the old Gov- ernor dying, she married Colonel Michael Went- worth, who ran through the property and then killed himself, leaving the legacy of his last words: i' I have had my cake, and ate it." These Wentworths were a powerful and hot- blooded race-nothing but the rigor of the law ever stood between them andy purpose; their talent made New Hampshire a power, and for sixty years they furnished her with Governors. On Pleasant street, at the head of Washington, is still to be found the house of Governor John Wentworth, a successor of Benning; old as it is, the plush upon its walls is as fresh as newly- pressed velvet, and valuable portraits of the Governors and their kin a few years since still hung upon them. Into this house, with its. pleasant garden running down to the river, once came a bride under circumstances that the customs of to-day would cause us to con- sider peculiar. It was Frances Deering, the pet and darling of old Sam Wentworth of Boston, and for whom the'pretty villages of Francestown and Deering were. named. When very young, she was in love with her cousin John, who, on leaving Harvard, went to Eng- land, no positive pledge of marriage passing between them; as he delayed there some years, before his return she had married another cousin, Theodore Atkinson by name. Some years subsequently to their marriage, and after a lingering illness, Theodore died. But John had, in the meantime, returned, clothed with honor and with the regalia of Governor, and, finding his cousin a woman of far lovelier ap- pearance than even her lovely youth had pro- mised, had not hesitated to pay her his devoirs, which, the gossips said, she had not hesitated to accept, hanging out many a signal from her window lor the Governor to read across the open space between their dwellings. On one day Theodore breathed his last. 'His burial took place on the following Wednesday; by the Governor's order all the bells in town were tolled, flags were hung at half-mast, anc. minute- guns were fired from the fort and from the Ships-of-war in the harbor. On Sunday the weeping widow, clad in crapes, listened in church to the funeral eulogies; on Monday her afflictlon was mitigated; on Tuesday all the fingers of all the seamstresses of the country roundabout were flying; and on the next Sun- day, in the white satins and jewels and far- dingales of a bride, she walked up the aisle the wife of Governor Wentworth. When tt e Revo- lution came, the Governor, a Tory, has to fly; but his wife's beauty won favor at the Court, she was appointed a lady-in-waiting there, and her husband was rewarded for his loyalty to the Crown by the governorship of Nova Scotia, where he held his state till death humbled it. Portsmouth, it may be seen, abounds in such traditions as these of the Wentworths. Of another sort is the story of Captain Samuel Cutts. He had sent out his vessel to the Span- Ish coasts, and his clerk, young William Ben- nett, who had been reared in his counting-room, and who, after the old-fashioned way made his master's interests his own, went supercargo; the vessel fell among thieves, but thieves who consented to' restore their booty upon receipt of several thousand dollars, a sum of much less value than the vessel and cargo. Captain Leigh, of course, had not the money with him, nor did it seem practicable to keep the vessel on full expense while a messenger wf&s sent home for it; but upon condition of leaving hostages he was suffered to sail away, youn I Bennett and a friend remaining. The terms were carefully impressed on Captain Leigh's] memory: so many days and it would b time for the money-till then the hostages were to be well treated ;.,the money not forthcoming, the hostages'were to be imprisoned on bread i and water; so many days more, and they were to be left unfed till they starved to death. Cap- tain Leigh, to whom Bennett was dear as a son, crowded on all sail for home, arrived, told his story, and, on sacred promise that the I money should instantly be paid, delivered the n ship that still belonged to her captors inso the hands of Captain. Samuel Cutts, and waited c breathlessly for the promise to be kept. Mean- l while the' friend of Bennett had escaped, Ben- t nett himself trusting so in his master's faith t that he refused to go. Captain Leigh waited a silently a while, but, seeing no prospect of the t ransom's being paid, he began to urge the n matter-precious time was passing; ther Ben- r nett's parents urged, and were assureC that p the money had been sent. But when, if the 8 money had been sent, it was time for Bennett's c return and yet he did not come, aLxiety b mounted again to fever-heat; there-were agon- c ized prayers offered in church by the pa-ents, a and Captain Leigh heard them ringing in his s ears; he could think of nothing else; he knew o the gradations of the cruel days apportioned M to Bennett: on such a day he went into soli- s tary continement; on sucha day he was de- a prived of food; on such a day he must have d ceased to live. When that day came, Benpett h had truly unc'ergone all his sentence anx was sl dead, and Captain Leigh was mad. X But all the traditions of splendor are not F confined to the gentility of Portsmouth. A E colored man, steward of a ship sailing frot the F Piscataqua, went into loftier society than many p D of his betters ever saw. He-was in a Russian - port, during a review held by the Emperor in ) person, and went on shore, only to attract as ). much attention as the Emperor himself for a black skin was rarer than black diamonds r there; The next day officials came on board I the ship, to learn If the black man's services rcould be had for the imperial family, and the fortunate fellow left his smoky caboose, hard fare and half-contemptuous companions, to become an object of admiration behind an Em- peror's chair; and, being allowed to return to Portsmbuth for his wife and children, had the satisfaction of parading his gold-laced grandeur before the humbler citizens to his heart's con- tent. It is not only in legends of the elegancies of colonial life, however, that Portsmouth is rich. She had her valiant part in all the old French and Indian wares, and the only ship-of-the-line owned by the Continental Government was here constructed, on Badger's Island, where a hundred ships had been built before. Congress having in 1776 ordered her agents to procure, among others, three seventy-four-gun ships, the America was begun, being the heaviest ship that had everbeen laid down on the conti- nent. Little was done about her, though, till nearly three years afterward, when John Paul Jones was ordered to command her. Jones came to, Portsmouth, found the ship only a skeleton, and, without material or money and in the face of countless obstacles, pushed for- ward her construction, though declaring it the most tedious and distasteful service he was ever charged with. As- soon as the British heard of the progress the ship was making, they devised a thousand plans to destroy her, intelligence of wnich was constantly furnished to Jones, in Cipher; and at last, on an alarm sent by General Washington himself, failing to obtain a guard from New Hampshire, he tre- vailed upon the carpenters to keep watch by night, and paid them irom his own purse; and they were otherwise rewarded by the sight of large whaleboats stealing into the river An muffled oars, and creeping, with their a&rmed companies, up and down by the America, without daring to board her. At the birth of the French Dauphin, Jones mounted artillery in the ship, decorated her with the flags of all na- tions, fired salutes. gave a great entertainment on board, and alter dark illuminated her from truck to keelson, kept up a Jeu de joie till mid- night, and on the anniversary of Independence repeated his rejoicings. The America was su- perbly built-both stern and bows made so strong that the men might always be under cover. Her sculpture, also, is stad to have been of a noble order: Amnerica, at the head, crowned with laurels, one arm raised to heaven, and the other supporting a buckler with thirteen silver stars on a blue ground.,while the rest of the person was enveloped in the smoke of war. Other large figures in relief were at the stern and elsewhere, representing Tyranny and Oppression, Neptune, and Mars, and Wis- dom surrounded by the lightnings. Jones, however, was destined never to command this ship on which he had lavished so much. The Magnifique, a seventy-four-gun ship of the French, having just been wrecked in Boston Harbor, Congress magnanimously presented to France the only ship-oIthe-line in the American possession, and for the tenth time Jones was page: 40-41[View Page 40-41] deprived of a oommhnd. Nevertheless, he com- pleted the ship, and at last launched her; the launching being no easy task in that little bay, wih the bluff of the opposite shore but a hun- dred fathoms distant, and ledges of rock and conflicting currents everywhere between. But, letting her slide precisely at high water, drop- ping the bow anchors and slipping the cable fastened to the ground on the island, at a sig- nal she was off and afloat in safe water, and given over to the late commander of the Magnifique. It was not long, though, before the British captured her-admiring her struc. ture and ornament so much, that they added to her carvings the crest of the Prince of Wales, and considered her peerless in all their fine navy. During the last war with England she did service against her builders, and is still afloat, a fifty-gun ship of the Queen's, "L an honor," says Mr. Brewster in his Rambles, "to Piscataqua shipwrights and to our coast oak."
