In the composing of this drama the author has need to seek his material in many a tangled thicket as well as in many an open field.  Facts accidentally encountered, which singly have but little perceptible significance, are sometimes strangely discovered to illustrate incidents long obscured and incapable of explanation.  They are like the lost links of a chain, which, being found, supply the means of giving cohesion and completeness to the heretofore useless fragments.  The scholar’s experience is full of these reunions of illustrative incidents gathered from regions far apart in space, and often in time.  The historian’s skill is challenged to its highest task in the effort to draw together those tissues of personal and local adventure which, at first without seeming or suspected dependence, prove, when brought into their proper relationship with each other, to be unerring exponents of events of highest concern.

It is pleasant to fall upon the course of one of these currents of adventure,—­to follow a solitary rivulet of tradition, such as by chance we now and then find modestly flowing along through the obscure coverts of time, and to be able to trace its progress to the confluence of other streams,—­and finally to see it grow, by the aid of these tributaries, to the proportions of an ample river, which waters the domain of authentic history and bears upon its bosom a clear testimony to the life and character of a people.

The following legend furnishes a striking and attractive exemplification of such a growth, in the unfolding of a romantic passage of Maryland history, of which no annalist has ever given more than an ambiguous and meagre hint.  It refers to a deed of bloodshed, of which the only trace that was not obliterated from living rumor so long as a century ago was to be found in a vague and misty relic of an old memory of the provincial period of the State.  The facts by which I have been enabled to bring it to the full light of an historical incident, it will be seen in the perusal of this narrative, have successively, and by most curious process of development, risen into view through a series of accidental discoveries, which have all combined, with singular coincidence and adaptation, to furnish an unquestionable chapter of Maryland history, altogether worthy of recital for its intrinsic interest, and still more worthy of preservation for the elements it supplies towards a correct estimate of the troubles which beset the career and formed the character and manners of the forefathers of the State.

CHAPTER I.

TALBOT’S CAVE.

It is now many years ago,—­long before I had reached manhood,—­that, through my intimacy with a friend, then venerable for his years and most attractive to me by his store of historical knowledge, I became acquainted with a tradition touching a strange incident that had reference to a mysterious person connected with a locality on the Susquehanna River near Havre de Grace.  In that day the tradition was repeated by a few of the oldest inhabitants who dwelt in the region.  I dare say it has now entirely run out of all remembrance amongst their descendants, and that I am, perhaps, the only individual in the State who has preserved any traces of the facts to which I allude.