to spend a whole play-day there, sitting in a circle round the verge of her hoop-petticoat, greedily attentive to her stories of a dead world.  And when these little boys and girls stole forth again from the dark, mysterious mansion, they went bewildered, full of old feelings that graver people had long ago forgotten, rubbing their eyes at the world around them as if they had gone astray into ancient times and become children of the past.  At home, when their parents asked where they had loitered such a weary while and with whom they had been at play, the children would talk of all the departed worthies of the province as far back as Governor Belcher and the haughty dame of Sir William Phipps.  It would seem as though they had been sitting on the knees of these famous personages, whom the grave had hidden for half a century, and had toyed with the embroidery of their rich waistcoats or roguishly pulled the long curls of their flowing wigs.  “But Governor Belcher has been dead this many a year,” would the mother say to her little boy.  “And did you really see him at the province-house?”—­“Oh yes, dear mother—­yes!” the half-dreaming child would answer.  “But when old Esther had done speaking about him, he faded away out of his chair.”  Thus, without affrighting her little guests, she led them by the hand into the chambers of her own desolate heart and made childhood’s fancy discern the ghosts that haunted there.

Living so continually in her own circle of ideas, and never regulating her mind by a proper reference to present things, Esther Dudley appears to have grown partially crazed.  It was found that she had no right sense of the progress and true state of the Revolutionary war, but held a constant faith that the armies of Britain were victorious on every field and destined to be ultimately triumphant.  Whenever the town rejoiced for a battle won by Washington or Gates or Morgan or Greene, the news, in passing through the door of the province-house as through the ivory gate of dreams, became metamorphosed into a strange tale of the prowess of Howe, Clinton or Cornwallis.  Sooner or later, it was her invincible belief, the colonies would be prostrate at the footstool of the king.  Sometimes she seemed to take for granted that such was already the case.  On one occasion she startled the townspeople by a brilliant illumination of the province-house with candles at every pane of glass and a transparency of the king’s initials and a crown of light in the great balcony-window.  The figure of the aged woman in the most gorgeous of her mildewed velvets and brocades was seen passing from casement to casement, until she paused before the balcony and flourished a huge key above her head.  Her wrinkled visage actually gleamed with triumph, as if the soul within her were a festal lamp.

“What means this blaze of light?  What does old Esther’s joy portend?” whispered a spectator.  “It is frightful to, see her gliding about the chambers and rejoicing there without a soul to bear her company.”