avy key of the province-house, and, delivering it into
the old lady's hands, drew his clonk around him for departure.

As the general glanced back at Esther Dudley's antique figure he
deemed her well fitted for such a charge, as being so perfect a
representative of the decayed past--of an age gone by, with its
manners, opinions, faith and feelings all fallen into oblivion or
scorn, of what had once been a reality, but was now merely a vision of
faded magnificence. Then Sir William Howe strode forth, smiting his
clenched hands together in the fierce anguish of his spirit, and old
Esther Dudley was left to keep watch in the lonely province-house,
dwelling there with Memory; and if Hope ever seemed to flit around
her, still it was Memory in disguise.

The total change of affairs that ensued on the departure of the
British troops did not drive the venerable lady from her stronghold.
There was not for many years afterward a governor of Massachusetts,
and the magistrates who had charge of such matters saw no objection to
Esther Dudley's residence in the province-house, especially as they
must otherwise have paid a hireling for taking care of the premises,
which with her was a labor of love; and so they left her the
undisturbed mistress of the old historic edifice. Many and strange
were the fables which the gossips whispered about her in all the
chimney-corners of the town.

Among the time-worn articles of furniture that had been left in the
mansion, there was a tall antique mirror which was well worthy of a
tale by itself, and perhaps may hereafter be the theme of one. The
gold of its heavily-wrought frame was tarnished, and its surface so
blurred that the old woman's figure, whenever she paused before it,
looked indistinct and ghostlike. But it was the general belief that
Esther could cause the governors of the overthrown dynasty, with the
beautiful ladies who had once adorned their festivals, the Indian
chiefs who had come up to the province-house to hold council or swear
allegiance, the grim provincial warriors, the severe clergymen--in
short, all the pageantry of gone days, all the figures that ever swept
across the broad-plate of glass in former times,--she could cause the
whole to reappear and people the inner world of the mirror with
shadows of old life. Such legends as these, together with the
singularity of her isolated existence, her age and the infirmity that
each added winter flung upon her, made Mistress Dudle