At the same time, having, as he said, shingles to spare, he patched and repaired the Old Free Grace Meeting-House, so that its gray and hoary exterior, while rejuvenated as to the roof and walls, presented in a little while an appearance as of a sudden eruption of bright yellow shingles upon its aged hide.  Nor would our Captain offer any other explanation for so odd a freak of fancy than to say that it pleased him to do as he chose with his own.

At last, the great house having been completed, and he himself having entered into it and furnished it to his satisfaction, our Captain presently began entertaining his friends therein with a profuseness of expenditure and an excess of extravagance that were the continued admiration of the whole colony.  In more part the guests whom Captain Obadiah thus received with so lavish an indulgence were officers or government officials from the garrisons of Newport or of Boston, with whom, by some means or other, he had scraped an acquaintance.  At times these gay gentlemen would fairly take possession of the town, parading up and down the street under conduct of their host, staring ladies out of countenance with the utmost coolness and effrontery, and offering loud and critical remarks concerning all that they beheld about them, expressing their opinions with the greatest freedom and jocularity.

Nor were the orgies at Belford’s Palace limited to such extravagances as gaming and dicing and drinking, for sometimes the community would be scandalized by the presence of gayly dressed and high-colored ladies, who came, no one knew whence, to enjoy the convivialities at the great house on the hill, and concerning whom it pleased the respectable folk of New Hope to entertain the gravest suspicion.

At first these things raised such a smoke that nothing else was to be seen, but by-and-by other strange and singular circumstances began to be spoken of—­at first among the common people, and then by others.  It began to be whispered and then to be said that the Old Free Grace Meeting-House out on the Point was haunted by the Devil.

The first information concerning this dreadful obsession arose from a fisherman, who, coming into the harbor of a nightfall after a stormy day, had, as he affirmed, beheld the old meeting-house all of a blaze of light.  Some time after, a tinker, making a short-cut from Stapleton by way of the old Indian road, had a view of a similar but a much more remarkable manifestation.  This time, as the itinerant most solemnly declared, the meeting-house was not only seen all alight, but a bell was ringing as a signal somewhere off across the darkness of the water, where, as he protested, there suddenly appeared a red star, that, blazing like a meteor with a surpassing brightness for a few seconds, was presently swallowed up into inky darkness again.  Upon another occasion a fiddler, returning home after midnight from Sprowle’s Neck, seeing the church alight, had, with a temerity inflamed by rum, approached to a nearer distance, whence, lying in the grass, he had, he said, at the stroke of midnight, beheld a multitude of figures emerge from the building, crying most dolorously, and then had heard a voice, as of a lost spirit, calling aloud, “Six-and-twenty, all told!” whereat the light in the church was instantly extinguished into an impenetrable darkness.