The portrait was of a young woman, something more than twenty years old, perhaps.  There were few pictures of any merit painted in New England before the time of Smibert, and I am at a loss to know what artist could have taken this half-length, which was evidently from life.  It was somewhat stiff and flat, but the grace of the figure and the sweetness of the expression reminded me of the angels of the early Florentine painters.  She must have been of some consideration, for she was dressed in paduasoy and lace with hanging sleeves, and the old carved frame showed how the picture had been prized by its former owners.  A proud eye she had, with all her sweetness.—­I think it was that which hanged her, as his strong arm hanged Minister George Burroughs;—­but it may have been a little mole on one cheek, which the artist had just hinted as a beauty rather than a deformity.  You know, I suppose, that nursling imps addict themselves, after the fashion of young opossums, to these little excrescences.  “Witch-marks” were good evidence that a young woman was one of the Devil’s wet-nurses;—­I should like to have seen you make fun of them in those days!—­Then she had a brooch in her bodice, that might have been taken for some devilish amulet or other; and she wore a ring upon one of her fingers, with a red stone in it, that flamed as if the painter had dipped his pencil in fire;—­who knows but that it was given her by a midnight suitor fresh from that fierce element, and licensed for a season to leave his couch of flame to tempt the unsanctified hearts of earthly maidens and brand their cheeks with the print of his scorching kisses?

She and I,—­he said, as he looked steadfastly at the canvas,—­she and I are the last of ’em.—­She will stay, and I shall go.  They never painted me,—­except when the boys used to make pictures of me with chalk on the board-fences.  They said the doctors would want my skeleton when I was dead.—­You are my friend, if you are a doctor,—­a’n’t you?

I just gave him my hand.  I had not the heart to speak.

I want to lie still,—­he said,—­after I am put to bed upon the hill yonder.  Can’t you have a great stone laid over me, as they did over the first settlers in the old burying-ground at Dorchester, so as to keep the wolves from digging them up?  I never slept easy over the sod;—­I should like to lie quiet under it.  And besides,—­he said, in a kind of scared whisper,—­I don’t want to have my bones stared at, as my body has been.  I don’t doubt I was a remarkable case; but, for God’s sake, oh, for God’s sake, don’t let ’em make a show of the cage I have been shut up in and looked through the bars of for so many years.