imorously homeward, and answered not again if the rude mob
reviled them in the street.

Yet Esther Dudley's most frequent and favored guests were the children
of the town. Toward them she was never stern. A kindly and loving
nature hindered elsewhere from its free course by a thousand rocky
prejudices lavished itself upon these little ones. By bribes of
gingerbread of her own making, stamped with a royal crown, she tempted
their sunny sportiveness beneath the gloomy portal of the
province-house, and would often beguile them to spend a whole play-day
there, sitting in a circle round the verge of her hoop-petticoat,
greedily attentive to her stories of a dead world. And when these
little boys and girls stole forth again from the dark, mysterious
mansion, they went bewildered, full of old feelings that graver people
had long ago forgotten, rubbing their eyes at the world around them as
if they had gone astray into ancient times and become children of the
past. At home, when their parents asked where they had loitered such a
weary while and with whom they had been at play, the children would
talk of all the departed worthies of the province as far back as
Governor Belcher and the haughty dame of Sir William Phipps. It would
seem as though they had been sitting on the knees of these famous
personages, whom the grave had hidden for half a century, and had
toyed with the embroidery of their rich waistcoats or roguishly pulled
the long curls of their flowing wigs. "But Governor Belcher has been
dead this many a year," would the mother say to her little boy. "And
did you really see him at the province-house?"--"Oh yes, dear
mother--yes!" the half-dreaming child would answer. "But when old
Esther had done speaking about him, he faded away out of his chair."
Thus, without affrighting her little guests, she led them by the hand
into the chambers of her own desolate heart and made childhood's fancy
discern the ghosts that haunted there.

Living so continually in her own circle of ideas, and never regulating
her mind by a proper reference to present things, Esther Dudley
appears to have grown partially crazed. It was found that she had no
right sense of the progress and true state of the Revolutionary war,
but held a constant faith that the armies of Britain were victorious
on every field and destined to be ultimately triumphant. Whenever the
town rejoiced for a battle won by Washington or Gates or Morgan or
Greene, the news, in pa