[Footnote 1:  A two-masted square-rigged vessel.]

So at the beginning of these events, upon the narrative of which the author now invites the reader to embark together with himself.

I

HOW THE DEVIL HAUNTED THE MEETING-HOUSE

At the period of this narrative the settlement of New Hope had grown into a very considerable seaport town, doing an extremely handsome trade with the West Indies in cornmeal and dried codfish for sugar, molasses, and rum.

Among the more important citizens of this now wealthy and elegant community, the most notable was Colonel William Belford—­a magnate at once distinguished and honored in the civil and military affairs of the colony.  This gentleman was an illegitimate son of the Earl of Clandennie by the daughter of a surgeon of the Sixty-seventh Regiment of Scots, and he had inherited a very considerable fortune upon the death of his father, from which he now enjoyed a comfortable competency.

Our Colonel made no little virtue of the circumstances of his exalted birth.  He was wont to address his father’s memory with a sobriety that lent to the fact of his illegitimacy a portentous air of seriousness, and he made no secret of the fact that he was the friend and the confidential correspondent of the present Earl of Clandennie.  In his intercourse with the several Colonial governors he assumed an attitude of authority that only his lineage could have supported him in maintaining, and, possessing a large and commanding presence, he bore himself with a continent reserve that never failed to inspire with awe those whom he saw fit to favor with his conversation.

This noble and distinguished gentleman possessed in a brother an exact and perfect opposite to himself.  Captain Obadiah Belford was a West Indian, an inhabitant of Kingston in the island of Jamaica.  He was a cursing, swearing, hard-drinking renegado from virtue; an acknowledged dealer in negro slaves, and reputed to have been a buccaneer, if not an out-and-out pirate, such as then infested those tropical latitudes in prodigious numbers.  He was not unknown in New Hope, which he had visited upon several occasions for a week or so at a time.  During each period he lodged with his brother, whose household he scandalized by such freaks as smoking his pipe of tobacco in the parlor, offering questionable pleasantries to the female servants, and cursing and swearing in the hallways with a fecundity and an ingenuity that would have put the most godless sailor about the docks to the blush.

Accordingly, it may then be supposed into what a dismay it threw Colonel Belford when one fine day he received a letter from Captain Obadiah, in which our West Indian desperado informed his brother that he proposed quitting those torrid latitudes in which he had lived for so long a time, and that he intended thenceforth to make his home in New Hope.