on over her descendants; that she
either manifested herself to them, or in some way impressed them, from
time to time; as in the case of the first pilgrim before he cast his
lot with the emigrants,--of one Mrs. Winslow, a descendant in the third
generation, when the Indians were about to attack the settlement where
she lived,--and of another, just before he was killed at Quebec.

There was a remarkable resemblance between the features of Ann Holyoake,
as shown in the portrait, and the miniature likeness of Myrtle's mother.
Myrtle adopted the nearly obsolete superstition more readily on this
account, and loved to cherish the fancy that the guardian spirit which
had watched over her ancestors was often near her, and would be with her
in her time of need.

The wife of Selah Withers was accused of sorcery in the evil days of
that delusion. A careless expression in one of her letters, that "ye
Parson was as lyke to bee in league with ye Divell as anie of em," had
got abroad, and given great offence to godly people. There was no doubt
that some odd "manifestations," as they would be called nowadays, had
taken place in the household when she was a girl, and that she presented
many of the conditions belonging to what are at the present day called
mediums.

Major Gideon Withers, her son, was of the very common type of hearty,
loud, portly men, who like to show themselves at militia trainings,
and to hear themselves shout orders at musters, or declaim patriotic
sentiments at town-meetings and in the General Court. He loved to wear
a crimson sash and a military cap with a large red feather, in which the
village folk used to say he looked as "hahnsome as a piny,"--meaning a
favorite flower of his, which is better spelt peony, and to which it was
not unnatural that his admirers should compare him.

If he had married a wife like himself, there might probably enough have
sprung from the alliance a family of moon-faced children, who would
have dropped into their places like posts into their holes, asking no
questions of life, contented, like so many other honest folks, with the
part of supernumeraries in the drama of being, their wardrobe of flesh
and bones being furnished them gratis, and nothing to do but to walk
across the stage wearing it. But Major Gideon Withers, for some reason
or other, married a slender, sensitive, nervous, romantic woman, which
accounted for the fact that his son David, "King David," as he was
called in h