ord
had set the great fans in motion. At the same moment a fall was heard,
then a cry, passing from anger into anguish. She rushed down the stair,
the lover appeared from his hiding-place at the same moment, and together
they dragged the old man to his feet. At the moment when the wind had
started the sails he had been standing on one of the mill-stones and the
sudden jerk had thrown him down. His arm caught between the grinding
surfaces and had been crushed to pulp. He was carried home and tenderly
nursed, but he did not live long; yet before he died he was made to see
the folly of his course, and he consented to the marriage that it had
cost him so dear to try to prevent. Before she could summon heart to fix
the wedding-day the girl passed many months of grief and repentance, and
for the rest of her life she avoided the old mill. There was good reason
for doing so, people said, for on windy nights the spirit of the old man
used to haunt the place, using such profanity that it became visible in
the form of blue lights, dancing and exploding about the building.

EDWARD RANDOLPH'S PORTRAIT

Nothing is left of Province House, the old home of the royal governors,
in Boston, but the gilded Indian that served as its weathercock and aimed
his arrow at the winds from the cupola. The house itself was swept away
long ago in the so-called march of improvement. In one of its rooms hung
a picture so dark that when Lieutenant-Governor Hutchinson went to live
there hardly anybody could say what it represented. There were hints that
it was a portrait of the devil, painted at a witch-meeting near Salem,
and that on the eve of disasters in the province a dreadful face had
glared from the canvas. Shirley had seen it on the night of the fall of
Ticonderoga, and servants had gone shuddering from the room, certain that
they had caught the glance of a malignant eye.

It was known to the governors, however, that the portrait, if not that of
the arch fiend, was that of one who in the popular mind was none the less
a devil: Edward Randolph, the traitor, who had repealed the first
provincial charter and deprived the colonists of their liberties. Under
the curse of the people he grew pale and pinched and ugly, his face at
last becoming so hateful that men were unwilling to look at it. Then it
was that he sat for his portrait. Threescore or odd years afterward,
Hutchinson sat in the hall wondering vaguely if coming events would
consign him