I have said that she had one son.  He was the child of her old age; but could hardly be called the comfort—­for, of all unlucky urchins, Dolph Heyliger was the most mischievous.  Not that the whipster was really vicious; he was only full of fun and frolic, and had that daring, gamesome spirit, which is extolled in a rich man’s child, but execrated in a poor man’s.  He was continually getting into scrapes:  his mother was incessantly harassed with complaints of some waggish pranks which he had played off; bills were sent in for windows that he had broken; in a word, he had not reached his fourteenth year before he was pronounced, by all the neighbourhood, to be a “wicked dog, the wickedest dog in the street!” Nay, one old gentleman, in a claret-coloured coat, with a thin red face, and ferret eyes, went so far as to assure Dame Heyliger, that her son would, one day or other, come to the gallows!

Yet, notwithstanding all this, the poor old soul loved her boy.  It seemed as though she loved him the better, the worse he behaved; and that he grew more in her favour, the more he grew out of favour with the world.  Mothers are foolish, fond-hearted beings; there’s no reasoning them out of their dotage; and, indeed, this poor woman’s child was all that was left to love her in this world;—­so we must not think it hard that she turned a deaf ear to her good friends, who sought to prove to her that Dolph would come to a halter.

To do the varlet justice, too, he was strongly attached to his parent.  He would not willingly have given her pain on any account; and when he had been doing wrong, it was but for him to catch his poor mother’s eye fixed wistfully and sorrowfully upon him, to fill his heart with bitterness and contrition.  But he was a heedless youngster, and could not, for the life of him, resist any new temptation to fun and mischief.  Though quick at his learning, whenever he could be brought to apply himself, yet he was always prone to be led away by idle company, and would play truant to hunt after birds’-nests, to rob orchards, or to swim in the Hudson.

In this way he grew up, a tall, lubberly boy; and his mother began to be greatly perplexed what to do with him, or how to put him in a way to do for himself; for he had acquired such an unlucky reputation, that no one seemed willing to employ him.

Many were the consultations that she held with Peter de Groodt, the clerk and sexton, who was her prime counsellor.  Peter was as much perplexed as herself, for he had no great opinion of the boy, and thought he would never come to good.  He at one time advised her to send him to sea—­a piece of advice only given in the most desperate cases; but Dame Heyliger would not listen to such an idea; she could not think of letting Dolph go out of her sight.  She was sitting one day knitting by her fireside, in great perplexity, when the sexton entered with an air of unusual vivacity and briskness.  He had just come