m taking this whiskey. I drink it to keep out the malaria, and partly
as a communion cup; for to-night the barefooted ghosts who have drooped
and withered here are with me in spirit."

"Dey was all good Milburns who lived heah, marster," said the negro.
"Dey had hard times, but did no sin. Dey shook wid chills and fevers,
not wid conscience."

"I shall shake with neither," said the money-lender. "Go up into the
loft, and sleep till you are called. I want the horses early for
Princess Anne!"

The negro obeyed without remark, and disappeared behind the
cupboard-like door. Milburn sat before the fire, and looked into it
long, while a procession of thoughts and phantoms passed before it.

He saw a poor family of independent Puritans setting sail at different
dates from English seaports. Some were indentured servants, hoping for a
career; others were avoiding the civil wars; others were small political
malefactors, noisy against the oppressions of their hero, Cromwell, and
conspirators against his power; and, thrown by him in English jails,
were only delivered to be sold into slavery, driven through the streets
of market-towns, placed on troop ships between the decks, among the
horses, and set up at auction in Barbadoes, like the blacks; whence they
in time continued onward westward. One, the fortunate possessor of some
competence, sailed his own ship across the Atlantic, and delivered up to
Massachusetts her governor and gentry. Another, incapable of being
suppressed, though a servant, seized the destinies of an aristocratic
colony, and held them for a while, until accumulating enemies bore him
down, and wedlock and the gibbet followed close together. Poverty would
not relinquish its gripe upon the race; they struggled up like clods
upon the ploughshare, and fell back again into the furrow.

As Meshach Milburn thought of these things he took up a portion of the
bog ore from the hearth.

"Here is iron," he said, thoughtfully, "true iron, which makes the blood
red, moulds into infinite forms, nails houses together, binds wheels,
and casts into cannon and ball. But this iron ran into a bog, formed low
combinations, and had no other mould than twigs and leaves afforded. Its
volcanic origin was forgotten when it ran with sand and gravel away from
the mountain vein and upland ore along the low, alluvial bar, till, like
an oyster, the iron is dredged from the stagnant pool, impure,
inefficacious, corrupted. So is it with man