Poor old Pompey! many years are past since he died, and went to keep company with the ghosts he was so fond of talking about.  He was buried in a comer of his own little potato-patch; the plough soon passed over his grave, and levelled it with the rest of the field, and nobody thought any more of the gray-headed negro.  By a singular chance, I was strolling in that neighbourhood several years afterwards, when I had grown up to be a young man, and I found a knot of gossips speculating on a skull which had just been turned up by a ploughshare.  They of course determined it to be the remains of some one that had been murdered, and they had raked up with it some of the traditionary tales of the haunted house.  I knew it at once to be the relic of poor Pompey, but I held my tongue; for I am too considerate of other people’s enjoyment, ever to mar a story of a ghost or a murder.  I took care, however, to see the bones of my old friend once more buried in a place where they were not likely to be disturbed.  As I sat on the turf and watched the interment, I fell into a long conversation with an old gentleman of the neighbourhood, John Josse Vandermoere, a pleasant gossiping man, whose whole life was spent in hearing and telling the news of the province.  He recollected old Pompey, and his stories about the Haunted House; but he assured me he could give me one still more strange than any that Pompey had related:  and on my expressing a great curiosity to hear it, he sat down beside me on the turf, and told the following tale.  I have endeavoured to give it as nearly as possible in his words; but it is now many years since, and I am grown old, and my memory is not over-good, I cannot therefore vouch for the language, but I am always scrupulous as to facts.

DOLPH HEYLIGER.

  “I take the town of Concord, where I dwell,
  All Kilborn be my witness, if I were not
  Begot in bashfulness, brought up in shamefacedness. 
  Let ’un bring a dog but to my vace that can
  Zay I have beat ’un, and without a vault;
  Or but a cat will swear upon a book,
  I have as much as zet a vire her tail,
  And I’ll give him or her a crown for ’mends.”

  —­Tale of a Tub.

In the early time of the province of New-York, while it groaned under the tyranny of the English governor, Lord Cornbury, who carried his cruelties towards the Dutch inhabitants so far as to allow no Dominie, or schoolmaster, to officiate in their language, without his special license; about this time, there lived in the jolly little old city of the Manhattoes, a kind motherly dame, known by the name of Dame Heyliger.  She was the widow of a Dutch sea-captain, who died suddenly of a fever, in consequence of working too hard, and eating too heartily, at the time when all the inhabitants turned out in a panic, to fortify the place against the invasion of a small French privateer.[14] He left her with very little money, and one infant