hat small, and now all but extinguished,
class whose attachment to royalty, and to the colonial institutions
and customs that were connected with it, had never yielded to the
democratic heresies of after-times. The young queen of Britain has not
a more loyal subject in her realm--perhaps not one who would kneel
before her throne with such reverential love--as this old grandsire
whose head has whitened beneath the mild sway of the republic which
still in his mellower moments he terms a usurpation. Yet prejudices so
obstinate have not made him an ungentle or impracticable companion. If
the truth must be told, the life of the aged loyalist has been of such
a scrambling and unsettled character--he has had so little choice of
friends and been so often destitute of any--that I doubt whether he
would refuse a cup of kindness with either Oliver Cromwell or John
Hancock, to say nothing of any democrat now upon the stage. In another
paper of this series I may perhaps give the reader a closer glimpse of
his portrait.

Our host in due season uncorked a bottle of Madeira of such exquisite
perfume and admirable flavor that he surely must have discovered it in
an ancient bin down deep beneath the deepest cellar where some jolly
old butler stored away the governor's choicest wine and forgot to
reveal the secret on his death-bed. Peace to his red-nosed ghost and a
libation to his memory! This precious liquor was imbibed by Mr.
Tiffany with peculiar zest, and after sipping the third glass it was
his pleasure to give us one of the oddest legends which he had yet
raked from the storehouse where he keeps such matters. With some
suitable adornments from my own fancy, it ran pretty much as follows.

* * * * *

Not long after Colonel Shute had assumed the government of
Massachusetts Bay--now nearly a hundred and twenty years ago--a young
lady of rank and fortune arrived from England to claim his protection
as her guardian. He was her distant relative, but the nearest who had
survived the gradual extinction of her family; so that no more
eligible shelter could be found for the rich and high-born Lady
Eleanore Rochcliffe than within the province-house of a Transatlantic
colony. The consort of Governor Shute, moreover, had been as a mother
to her childhood, and was now anxious to receive her in the hope that
a beautiful young woman would be exposed to infinitely less peril from
the primitive society of New Englan