eless
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 loc