the grave
historian. Nothing impressed me more than a story of a black
mysterious picture which used to hang in one of the chambers of the
Province House, directly above the room where we were now sitting. The
following is as correct a version of the fact as the reader would be
likely to obtain from any other source, although, assuredly, it has a
tinge of romance approaching to the marvellous.

* * * * *

In one of the apartments of the province-house there was long
preserved an ancient picture the frame of which was as black as ebony,
and the canvas itself so dark with age, damp and smoke that not a
touch of the painter's art could be discerned. Time had thrown an
impenetrable veil over it and left to tradition and fable and
conjecture to say what had once been there portrayed. During the rule
of many successive governors it had hung, by prescriptive and
undisputed right, over the mantel piece of the same chamber, and it
still kept its place when Lieutenant-governor Hutchinson assumed the
administration of the province on the departure of Sir Francis
Bernard.

The lieutenant-governor sat one afternoon resting his head against the
carved back of his stately arm-chair and gazing up thoughtfully at the
void blackness of the picture. It was scarcely a time for such
inactive musing, when affairs of the deepest moment required the
ruler's decision; for within that very hour Hutchinson had received
intelligence of the arrival of a British fleet bringing three
regiments from Halifax to overawe the insubordination of the people.
These troops awaited his permission to occupy the fortress of Castle
William and the town itself, yet, instead of affixing his signature to
an official order, there sat the lieutenant-governor so carefully
scrutinizing the black waste of canvas that his demeanor attracted the
notice of two young persons who attended him. One, wearing a military
dress of buff, was his kinsman, Francis Lincoln, the provincial
captain of Castle William; the other, who sat on a low stool beside
his chair, was Alice Vane, his favorite niece. She was clad entirely
in white--a pale, ethereal creature who, though a native of New
England, had been educated abroad and seemed not merely a stranger
from another clime, but almost a being from another world. For several
years, until left an orphan, she had dwelt with her father in sunny
Italy, and there had acquired a taste and enthusiasm for sculp