Stage-coach and Tavern Days

There put up that year in December at an Albany tavern a young man who gave his name as Johnson; he was aristocratic in bearing and dress, dark of complexion, sombre of aspect, but courteous and pleasant, “with a daring but cultivated eye.” When questioned of himself and his business, however, Johnson was silent and taciturn. His magnificent horse and pair of splendid pistols were noted by the solid Dutch burghers and sharp Yankee traders who smoked and drank beer within the tavern walls; and one wintry afternoon the stranger was seen carefully cleaning the pair of pistols.

On that bitter night, a man – none other than our black-browed highwayman – rode clattering up to the toll-gate two miles below the town, and called out to open the gate; when the wife of the toll-keeper appeared to do that duty he jumped from his horse, rushed in toward the house, demanding in a terrible voice all the money in the toll till and chest. The woman was terrified at this demand, yet not so scared but she could at his first approach throw the fat bag with all the accumulation of toll money under the porch, and do it unseen by the highwayman; and she at once asserted tearfully, with the alacritous mendacity born of sharp terror (the account says with great earnestness and womanish simplicity), that her husband had gone to the agent in town with all the month’s collections, leaving her but a few shillings for change, which she displayed in the gate-drawer for proof. Disgusted but credulous, the villain rode off with loud oaths, baffled in the simplest fashion by Dame Trusty No. 1.

He then went to the tavern of John Pye, the wealthy landlord, on the West Troy road. He found the house locked peacefully for the night, but forced a window and entered. In the barroom and kitchen, the fire was carefully covered to keep till morning. Lighting his dark lantern with the coals, he then poured water on both fires and extinguished them, and I have puzzled long in my mind wondering why he dallied, risking detection by doing this. He then went to the room where Pye and his wife were peacefully reposing, and rudely awakened them. Mrs. Pye, promptly assuming the rôle she carried throughout, jumped from her bed and asked him what he wished. He answered, the chap-book says, “silently,” “I deal with your husband, Madam, not with you” – and a more fatuous mistake never issued from lips of highwayman. To Pye he then said, “Your money or your life.” Pye, heavy with sleep – and natural stupidity – seemed to fancy some trick was being played on him in mischief, and to the highwayman’s demand for money answered, half alarmed, half peevish, “It’s damned little money you’ll get out of me, my lad, as the thing is but indifferently plenty with me.” But he was roused at last by the fierceness of threats and gestures, and whimpered that his money was below; and the two proceeded downstairs to the taproom by the light of the robber’s lantern. The moment they left the room, Mrs. Pye ran softly to a bedroom where slept two sojourners at the inn, wakened them with hurried words of the robber’s visit and her beloved Pye’s danger, and made appeals for help; and as an emphatic wakener pulled them out of bed upon the floor. Then she ran swiftly back to bed.

In the meantime the terrified Pye recalled that his wife had the keys of the taproom till which held his money, and he and the highwayman returned to her bedroom and demanded them from her. “I’ll give the keys to thee nor no man else,” she stoutly answered. “Thee must, I tell thee,” whined Pye, “or worse may happen.” “Pye, I’ll not give up my keys,” still she cried, and seized a loaded gun by the bedside; for fierce answer the highwayman fired his pistol at Pye. With lamentable outcries Pye called out he was a dead man, and his arm fell to his side. His wife thrust the gun in his hands, shouting, “Fire, Pye, fire! he’s feeling for another pistol.” “I cannot,” he quavered out, “I cannot hold the gun.” She pushed it into his hands, held up his arm, aimed for him, and between them they pulled the trigger. In a second all was utter darkness and stillness: they had hit the highwayman. He pitched forward, fell on his lantern, put it out, and lay as one dead. Here was a situation for a good, thrifty, staid Albany vrouw, a dying husband on one side, a dead highwayman on the other, all in utter darkness. She ran for coals to the barroom and kitchen fires. Both were wet and black. She had no tinder box, coals must be brought from a neighbor’s. She suddenly bethought of an unusual fire that had been lighted in the parlor the previous evening for customers, where still might be a live coal. This was her good fortune, and with lighted candle she proceeded to the scene of attack. Pye lay in a swoon on the bed, but by this time the highwayman had vanished; and safe and untouched under the bed were five hundred dollars in gold and five hundred more in bills, which, it is plain, Pye himself had wholly forgotten in his fright.

In the meantime where were the two “knights of the bedchamber,” as the chap-book calls them? Far more silently than the robber they feared had they slid downstairs, and away from the tavern into hiding, until the highwayman rode past them.

They then tracked him by trails of blood, and soon saw him dismounted and rolling in the snow as if to quench the flow of blood. Though they knew he was terribly wounded and they were two to one, they stole past him at a safe distance in silence to the protection of the town, where they raised the cry of “A robber! Watch! Murder! Help! A band of highwaymen! Pye is dead!” Oh, how bravely they bawled and shouted! and soon a hue and cry was started from end to end of Albany town.

With an extraordinary lack of shrewdness which seemed to characterize the whole of this episode of violence, and which proved Johnson no trained “swift-nick,” as Charles II. called highwaymen, instead of making off to some of the smaller towns or into the country, he rode back to Albany; and soon the night-capped heads thrust from the little Dutch windows, and terrified men leaning out over the Dutch doors, and the few amazed groups in the streets saw a fleet horseman, hatless, with bloody handkerchief bound around his head, come galloping and thundering through Albany, down one street, then back again to the river. When he reached the quay, the horse fearlessly sprang without a moment’s trembling a terrible leap, eight feet perpendicular, twenty feet lateral, out on the ice. All screamed out that horse and rider would go through the ice and perish. But the ice was strong, and soon horse and rider were out of sight; but mounted men were now following the distant sound of hoofs, and when the outlaw reached what he thought was the opposite shore, but what was really a marshy island, one bold pursuer rode up after him. The robber turned, fired at him at random, and the Albany brave fled in dismay back to his discreet neighbors.

But honor and courage was now appearing across the ice in the figure of Captain Winne, the pennypost, who was heard to mutter excitedly in his semi-Dutch dialect: “Mine Cott! vat leeps das horse has mate! vull dwenty feet! Dunder and bliksem! he’s der tuyfel for rooning!” Winne was an old Indian fighter, and soon he boldly grappled the highwayman, who drew a dagger on him. Winne knocked it from his hand. The highwayman grappled with him, wrenched away his club, and hit the pennypost a blow on his mouth which loosened all his front teeth (which, the chap-book says, “Winne afterwards took out at his leisure”). Winne then dallied no longer; he pulled down the handkerchief from the robber’s forehead, twisted it around his neck, and choked him. In the morning twilight the great band of cautious Albanians gravely advanced, bound the highwayman securely, and carried him in triumph back to jail. He was placed in heavy irons, when he said, “Iron me as you will, you can hold me but a short time.” All thought he meant to attempt an escape, but he spoke with fuller meaning; he felt himself mortally wounded. They put an iron belt around his waist and fastened it by a heavy chain to a staple in the floor. They placed great rings around his ankles, chained them to the floor, and then chained ankle-bands and belt together. They would have put an iron collar and chain on him also, but he said, “Gentlemen! have some mercy!” and a horrible wound at the base of the brain made them desist.

Poor Mrs. Pye visited him, with much distress of spirit, and sympathized with him and grieved over him as he lay face downward on the stone floor. And it arouses a sense of amused indignation to know that he asked earnestly for Pye and expressed deep regret at having injured him – he wasn’t badly hurt, anyway. Our heroine, Dame Pye, certainly deserved a better and braver husband, and it is pleasant to know that she outlived Pye and found, if not a more courageous mate, certainly a very fine young one – her bar-keeper, forty years younger than herself.

The highwayman escaped the tree, for he died in jail. There is reason to believe he was a Southerner of good birth. The horse was so widely described and exploited that his story reached a Virginia gentleman, his real owner, from whom he had been stolen. The sagacious animal had been trained to follow a peculiar whistle, and to jump at anything. The gentleman proved his ownership and took the splendid animal-hero home.

In the year 1821 a highwayman was executed in Massachusetts, Mike Martin, or Captain Lightfoot, who really was a very satisfactory outlaw, a real hightoby-crack, though he was only an imported one, not a native production. His life, as given by himself, is most entertaining. He had to his father a Kilkenny Irishman, who apprenticed the boy early in life to his uncle, a brewer. The brewer promptly beat him, he ran home, and got a bigger beating. In truth, he was a most beatable brat. When sixteen years old he joined the Ribbonmen, a political organization that committed many petty crimes and misdemeanors, besides regulating landlords. When his father found out the kind of company kept by the young rascal, he beat him again. Mike promptly took as a salve five guineas from his father’s trunk, opening it with a master-key which had been kindly made for him by a Ribbonman, and which he was enjoined to keep constantly with him as a conveniency. He says, “I had always stolen in a small way.” With his five guineas he ran away to Dublin, and pretended reformation and remorse so successfully to a cousin that the latter employed him in a distillery. In return he stole petty amounts continually from his cousin’s money chest, by help of his master-key. Soon he was a settled outcast, and at this juncture met at an inn a fine, handsome clergyman, about forty years of age, over six feet tall, dark-eyed, of great muscle and strength; his name was John Doherty. In spite of his black clerical dress he seemed somewhat mysterious in character, and after pumping Martin he disclosed in turn that he was the famous highwayman, Captain Thunderbolt.

He at once claimed Martin as one of the real sort, and they were talking over a union of forces and schemes when a party of dragoons came to the inn in pursuit of Thunderbolt. He escaped through a window, but in a week’s time came back dressed as a Quaker and joined his companion, who at the age of twenty-one thus blossomed out as a real knight of the road, as Captain Lightfoot, with a pair of fine pistols and a splendid horse, “Down the Banks,” to keep company with Thunderbolt’s “Beefsteak.” Thus equipped, these two gentlemen rode as gentlemen should, to the hunt. There, alone, to prove what he could do, Mike Martin robbed four huntsmen, and to his pride was mistaken by them for Thunderbolt himself. But the huntsmen soon had their turn; sheriffs and soldiers drove the two knights to the woods; and after weeks of uncomfortable hiding Mike Martin was properly penitent and longed for an honest man’s seat in a tavern taproom. There is no retreat, however, in this career; the pair of robbers next entered a house, called all the people together, and robbed the entire trembling lot. Through Scotland and Ireland they rode till the highways got too hot for them, advertisements were everywhere, a hue and cry was out, and Thunderbolt fled to America.

Mike Martin, terrified at the multiplying advertisements and rewards, disguised himself, and sailed for New York. Quarrels and mutiny on shipboard brought him ashore at Salem, where he worked for a time for Mr. Derby. He soon received a sum of money from his father’s estate and set up as a brewer. But Salem Yankees were too sharp for the honest highwayman, and he lost it all and had to take again to the road. From Portsmouth to Canada, – from pedlers, from gentlemen, – on horseback, in chaises, – he ran his rig; finally, in spite of advertisements in newspapers and printed reports and handbills at every country inn, he worked his way back to New Hampshire; and on a moonlight night he found himself horseless in the bushes. Two men rode up, and one held back as Mike Martin stepped forth. “Who’s that?” said the foremost man. “I’m the bold Doherty from Scotland,” said he, taking Thunderbolt’s name and not in vain. “And what are you after?” said the shaking traveller. “Stop and I’ll show you.” Mike then presented his pistol and demanded of the gentleman his money or his life. Promptly money and papers were turned over. “Stand back by the fence,” said the highwayman. “Here, Jack, look after this fellow,” he swaggered to make the traveller think he had an accomplice; and he mounted the fine horse and rode off. He robbed some one in some way every few miles on the road till he was back in Salem. There he promptly acquiesced to the decorous customs of the New England town, and went to a lecture; on his way home from his intellectual refreshment, he asked the time of a well-dressed man. “Can’t you hear the clock strike?” was the surly answer. “I’ll hear your watch strike or strike your head,” was the surprising reply. Out came watch and money with the cowardly alacrity ever displayed at his demands. From thence to the Sun Tavern in Boston, where he learned of a grand party at Governor Brooks’s at Medford. He said in his confession, “I thought there might be some fat ones there and decided to be of the company.” After an evening of astonishing bravado and recklessness, displaying himself at taverns and on the road, he held up Major Bray and his wife on the Medford turnpike, near the Ten Mile Farm which once belonged to Governor Winthrop. The gentlefolk were in “a genteel horse and chaise.” Madam Bray began to try to conceal her watch-chain, but Captain Lightfoot politely told her he never robbed ladies. Major Bray turned over his watch and pocketbook, but begged to keep his papers. Martin said later, “The circumstances as given by Major Bray at the trial were correct, only he forgot to state that he was much frightened and trembled like a leaf.” After stopping other chaises, he took the surprisingly foolhardy step of going to the tavern at Medford, where he found already much excitement about the robbery of Major Bray, and met many suspicious glances. He rode off, and soon a crowd was after him crying, “Stop Thief.”

In his mad flight his stirrup broke, he fell from his horse and dislocated his shoulder; thence through fields and marshes on foot till he dropped senseless from pain and fatigue. When he recovered, he tied his suspenders to a tree at one end and the other end to his wrist and pulled the shoulder into place. Then by day and night through farms and woods to Holliston. In the taproom of the tavern he called for brandy, but he saw such a good description of himself with a reward for his capture, while he was drinking off his glass, it took away his appetite for the dinner he had ordered.

He was then tired of foot travel, and stole a horse and rode to Springfield. Here he put up at a tavern, where he slept so sound that he was only awakened by landlord, sheriff, and a score of helpers who had traced the horse to Springfield. Major Bray’s robbery was unknown there, but he was tried for it, however, when it was found out, on October 21, and convicted and sentenced to death. He cheerfully announced that he should escape if he could, but he was put in heavy irons. When in jail at Lechmere Point he struck the turnkey, Mr. Coolidge, on the head with his severed chain. He pushed past the stunned keeper, thrust open the door, and ran for his life. He was captured in a cornfield and Coolidge was the man who grabbed him. It was found that he had filed through the chain with a case-knife, filled the cut with a paste of tallow and coal-dust, and though the link had been frequently examined the cut had never been noted. He declared he would have escaped, only the heavy chain and weight which he had worn had made him lose the full use of his legs, and he had to run with one end of the chain and a seventeen-pound weight in his hand.

He was executed in December and behaved with great propriety and sobriety. He showed neither cant, levity, nor bravado. He prayed silently just before his death, professed penitence, and went to the gallows with composure. He arranged his dress and hair carefully before a glass, showed a kind disposition to all, and finally gave the signal himself for the drop. A tall and handsome scamp, with piercing blue eyes and fine complexion, his marked intelligence and sweetness of expression made him most attractive. His frame was perfect in symmetry, and he was wonderful in his strength and endurance – truly an ideal highwayman; it must have been a pleasure to meet him.

Thus it is very evident that neither highway robbery nor highwaymen thrived in America. They mended their ways very promptly – and apparently they wanted to. A very striking example of this is in the American career of Captain Thunderbolt, the friend and teacher of Mike Martin. When he set foot on American soil, he tamely abandoned all his old picturesque wicked ways. He settled first in Dummerston, Vermont, where he taught school and passed his leisure hours in seclusion and study. He then set up as a physician, in Newfane, Vermont, calling himself Dr. Wilson, and he moved from thence to Brattleboro, where his house stood on the present site of the railroad station. He married the daughter of a prominent Brattleboro farmer, but was too stern and reserved to prove a good American husband. He lived to be about sixty-five years old, and had a good and lucrative professional practice.

I know two authentic cases of highway robbery of stage-coaches in New England; one was from the driver, of a large sum of money which had been entrusted to him. It was his wife who stole it. She was not prosecuted, for she returned the money, and it was believed she would not have taken it from any one else. The other theft was that of a bonnet. Just as a stage was to start off from a tavern door, a woman jumped on the step, seized the bonnet of a woman passenger, tore it from her head, and made off with it before the outraged traveller’s shrieks could reach the driver and stop the coach; and – as the chronicler solemnly recounted to me – the robber was never heard of more. These two highwaywomen have the honors of the road.

It may be deemed somewhat grandiloquent to term to-day this theft of a bonnet “highway robbery”; but I can assure you a fine bonnet was a most respected belonging in olden times, and if of real Dunstable or fine Leghorn straw and trimmed with real ostrich plumes it might be also a costly belonging, and to steal it was no light matter – indeed it was a hanging matter. For in Boston, when John Hancock was governor, a woman was hanged for snatching a bonnet from another’s head and running off with it.

CHAPTER XIX

TAVERN GHOSTS

England was ever the birthplace and abiding-place of ghosts. Thoroughly respectable most of these old residents were, their manifestations being stereotyped with all the conventionalities of the spirit world. When the colonists came to the new world the friendly and familiar spectres did not desert their old companions, but emigrated also, and “sett down satysfyed” in enlarged log cabins, and houses built of American pine, just as the planters did; and in these humbler domiciles both classes of inhabitants were soon as much at home as they had been in oaken manor houses and stone castles in the “ould countrie.”

In New England the tavern was often the chosen place of abode and of visitation of spirits; like other travellers on life’s weary round, these travellers on the round of the dead found their warmest welcome at an inn. Naturally new conditions developed new phenomena; the spirits of unhappy peasants, of cruel barons, of hated heirs at law, of lovelorn ladies, found novel companions, among whom the manitous and wraiths of the red men cut the strangest figure. The ghosts of pirates, too, were prime favorites in America, especially in seaboard towns, but were never such frequent visitors, nor on the whole such picturesque visitors, as were the spirits of Indians: —

“The ghosts that come to haunt us
From the kingdom of Ponemah,
From the land of the Hereafter.”

I have known a good many tavern ghosts of Indians – though their deeds as recounted are often far from being original or aboriginal. Reuben Jencks owned a tavern that had a very good Indian ghost. This ghost was not one of the inconsiderate kind that comes when you are awake, and half scares you to death; this noble red man stole in silently by night, so silently that the sleeper never awakened, and hence was never frightened, for nothing seems overstrange, uncanny, or impossible in a dream. Even when the Indian brandished his tomahawk and seized the visited one by the hair of the head, it never seemed to be anything more than might be expected, nor did he ever appear overfierce in his threats and gestures. Nevertheless in course of time his appearances gave a name to the apartment he visited; it came to be known as the Indian Chamber. And travelling chapmen, pedlers, or traders who had been over the route frequently, and had heard the tale at every trip, sometimes objected to sleeping in the room – not that they were afraid – but it was somewhat of a nuisance.

It was not known that any Indian ever had received aught of injury at the hands of any at the Black Horse Tavern, save the derivative injury from too frequent and liberal draughts of hard cider, which was freely dealt out to every sorry brave who wandered there. There were some simpletons who said that the Indian’s visits were to resent the injury done to another old inn, a rival down the road, named The Pine Tree, but which bore the figure of an Indian on its sign-board, and was oftener known as The Indian Tavern. This was nonsense. The Pine Tree had no visitors because it did not deserve them, had a vile table and a worse stable, while the Black Horse Tavern gave the best of the earth to its guests.

Reuben Jencks had not been born in this tavern. He inherited it from an uncle, and he was already married and had a family of small children when the tavern came to him. Another baby was born soon after, and as the Indian Chamber was the largest in the house, Mrs. Jencks quietly disposed of the objections of timid and superstitious chapmen and pedlers by taking the room for her own sleeping apartment.

It would seem to be a brave warrior, albeit a savage and a ghost, who would enter a room as densely populated as that of Mr. and Mrs. Jencks. There was for the repose of landlord and landlady a vast four-post bedstead with curtains, valance, and tester of white dimity; and under this high bed was thrust by day a low trundle bed. At night it was drawn out, and upon it slept the three little daughters of the Jencks family. Upon an old high-backed settle set on rockers slept Reuben Jencks, Jr., the deposed king of the family. Adjustable bars slipped in the front of this settle made it a safe crib. This stood on one side of the fireplace, and the new baby reposed, when he slept at all, in a deeply hooded mahogany cradle. There was a great fire ever and cheerfully burning in the fireplace – and yet to this chamber of infantile innocence and comfort came the saturnine form of the Indian ghost.

He was, in one sense, a thoroughly satisfactory apparition, being suitably clad in full trappings of war, buckskin and turkey feathers, bear’s teeth and paint; he was none of those miserable half-breed travesties of Indians who sometimes still sneaked round to the tavern kitchen, clad in vile clothes of civilization, so greasy and worn and dirty that a blanket would have been as stately in comparison as a Roman toga; Indians devoid of bravery, dignity, and even of cunning, whose laziness, high cheek-bones, and hair coarse as a horse’s tail, and their unvarying love of rum, were the only proofs of Indian blood; whose skin, even, had turned from copper tawny to dingy yellow.

To Mrs. Jencks, reposing in state among her abundant goose feathers on the high bedstead, came one night the spectre in her dreams, pulled off her nightcap, seized her by her long hair, dragged her downstairs and out of doors, pointed fiercely to the roots of the great cedar at the gate, muttering all the while in broken English of avenging an insult to his race. As Mrs. Jencks awoke wholly uninjured, she merely laughed at her vision, saying that all the talk she had heard had made her dream it. But when she had dreamt it three times, three nights running, and the ghost kept speaking of an act of insult to him, that it must be avenged, removed, etc., and kept ever pointing to the base of the cedar tree, Ben Jencks insisted on digging for what he felt sure was hidden treasure. He and his menials dug deep and dug wide, and nearly killed the splendid old cedar, but found nothing. The next time the ghost appeared he dragged the astral body of Mrs. Jencks down to the other cedar tree on the right-hand side of the gateway. Ben Jencks dug again with the same result. Neither he nor the ghost was daunted, and a fine apple tree in the garden next the orchard was the next victim. It was a Sapson apple tree, the variety which all the children loved, and it ceased bearing for several years. As it wilted and pined after the rough spading at its roots, Mrs. Jencks doggedly vowed never to repeat any of the ghost’s lies again.

We must not be too contemptuous of this unprincipled Indian spirit. He simply belonged to a class of ghosts of whom Andrew Lang says complainingly that they have a passion for pointing out places and saying treasures or skeletons are buried within; whereas it always proves that nothing of the sort is ever found. There are liars among the living as well as of the dead, and Mrs. Jencks’s Indian never said it was a treasure – he only hinted darkly at the buried thing being associated with some degradation or insult to the Indian race. The treasure was all in Ben Jencks’s brain – and the brains of his friends. Mrs. Jencks’s silence to her husband did not prevent her however from having several treasure-hunts alone by herself, after the Indian’s renewed visits and pointing finger, for he changed nothing in his programme save the spot he indicated. She spent an entire day pulling and poking among the attic rafters. She rolled out several empty cider barrels from a distant cellar corner, and even dug a hole there secretly. Her husband at last discovered her mysteriously poking a hole down a disused well, and promptly had the well cleaned out; but of course nothing was found save the usual well contents, and thus the years rolled on.

One morning Lucy Jencks whimpered that the Indian had pulled her out of bed in the night and pointed out to her where to hunt. Lucy was nearly eleven years old; a clever, sharp, active little Yankee, who helped to shell peas and string beans and scour pewter, and who could knit famously and spin pretty well. This brought her naturally in the company of her elders, and she proved the influence of the ghost talk she had heard by repeating the Indian’s words that “the derision of his ancient race, the degradation of his ancient customs, must be avenged.” Derision and degradation are too big words for a little girl to use untutored, or for an Indian ghost either; and in truth they were not the precise words he had spoken at first. But Parson Pillsbury had been present at the digging under the Sapson apple tree, a piously sceptical but secretly interested spectator, and he had thus explained the somewhat broken “Injun-talk” which Mrs. Jencks reported. It proves the tractability and intelligence of this ghost of a heathen that he ever after used the words of the Puritan minister.

The ghost pointed out to Lucy Jencks a very inaccessible spot to be searched. It was the farther end of a loft over a shed, and had to be entered by a short ladder from a leanto. This loft was packed solidly with the accumulated debris of three-quarters of a century, portions of farm tools, poor old furniture, boxes, barrels, every old stuff and piece that was too mean even for the main attic, in which were poor enough relics. It had never been searched or sorted out since Ben Jencks came to the tavern, and I doubt whether Mrs. Jencks would have listened to a ransacking then but for one circumstance, the Jencks family were going to leave the Black House Tavern – and they really ought to know exactly what was in it ere they sold it with its contents. They had not been driven from the family home by this Indian spirit of dreams, but by a more powerful spirit – that of emigration. Neighbors and friends in Rutland and Worcester were going to Ohio – that strange new territory, and they would go too. A single dead Indian, and such a liar, too, seemed of but little account when they thought of the infinite bands of very live Indians in their chosen home.

Mrs. Jencks and Lucy climbed the ladder to the loft, opened the single shutter, and let in a narrow dancing ray of dusty sunlight on the crowded desolation within. Lucy pointed between bars and barrels and bags, with slender white finger, at a large and remote box which a slender, strong, copper-colored hand had pointed out to her in her dreams. Her mother sternly sent her below to do her stent at quilt-piecing, and she tearfully and unwillingly descended. It was nearly an hour ere the strong arms of Mrs. Jencks had dislodged and repacked the unutterable chaos to the extent of reaching the box. Clouds of dust dimmed the air. She untied and removed a rotten rope that bound the box, which even in the dim litter looked like the upper half of a coffin. Within lay something swathed in linen bands and strips of old flannel – newspapers were then too precious for wrappings. She struck it, and there came a faint rattle of metal. The thought came to her of the description of a mummy which she had read a few nights before in the almanac. She paused; then twisted in and among the boxes to the head of the ladder. She could hear the sound of Perseverance singing a hymn. Perseverance Abbott was the “help,” the sister of a farmer neighbor, and she was baking “rye and Injun” bread for the teamsters who would stop there at nightfall. Mrs. Jencks called down, “Persy, come here a minute!” “I’ll tell her to come,” piped up the shrill voice of Lucy, who was hovering at the base of the ladder and evidently meant to be “in at the death.” Perseverance appeared, floury and serene, at the foot of the ladder. “I’ll come,” she said, in answer to Mrs. Jencks’s appeal for assistance, “because I know you’re scairt, and I ain’t a-goin’ to see Ben Jencks a-huntin for them Indian bones again. I’ve been dyin’, anyway, to clear this out ever since I come here, an’ this’ll be the beginnin’.” “Persy,” said Mrs. Jencks, hesitatingly, “it seems to be something dead.” “Dead!” answered her hand-maid, “I’ll bet it’s dead after layin’ here forty, perhaps a hundred year!” An atmosphere of good sense and fearlessness seemed to halo her about; still both women unwrapped the heavy thing, the mummy, with care. A bare shining scalp came first to view. “It’s a wig-block,” shouted Perseverance in a moment, “yes, and here’s curling irons and wire wig-springs.”

It was “grandpa’s wig-block,” so Reuben Jencks said, when he saw it later; his grandfather had added to his duties of tavern-keeper, roadmaster, selectman, and deacon, that of wig-maker. And in that day, when all men of any station wore handsome flowing wigs, and all, even poor men, wore wigs of some kind, it was a calling of importance. Moreover, an Indian with a tomahawk cut but a sorry figure when he tried to scalp a man who wore a wig; it was a deriding insult to the warlike customs of the whole Indian race.

There is a fine old brick tavern still standing in a New England seaboard town, and now doing service as a rather disreputable road house. It is a building rigidly square, set due north, south, east, and west, with four long, narrow doors opening over broad door-stones to the four ends of the earth. A long tail of summer and winter kitchens, a wash-room, brew-house, smoke-house, wood-rooms, sheds, barns, piggeries, pigeon-houses, hen-houses, once stretched a hundred feet or more adown the road, part of which is now torn down. Each joint of the tail helped loyally in olden times to furnish good cheer to the traveller. The great square rooms of the main house are amply furnished; one was a taproom, and in each second-story room still are two double beds, save in the corner room next the kitchen tail of the house, where stands nailed firmly to the floor of the room a somewhat battered oaken table. A little open staircase in the corner of this room leads down to the working end of the house, and was used in olden days to carry supplies to the upper table from the lower kitchen.

It has been many a year since good cheer was spread on that broad oaken board, though at one time it was the favorite dining place of a choice brotherhood of old salts, called the Mariners’ Club, who gathered there when on shore to tell tales of wild privateering, and of sharp foreign trade, and to plan new and profitable ventures. Many of these Mariners’ Clubs and Marine Societies existed in seaport towns at that golden time in New England’s marine commercial history.

This room was the scene about seventy-five years ago of a somewhat unusual expression of feminine revolt – that is, both the expression and the revolt were unusual. One of the most constant frequenters of the tavern, the heaviest eater and deepest drinker, the greatest money-spender at these Mariners’ dinners, was one Captain Sam Blood, who ran a large coasting brig, which made but short trips to Atlantic seaports. Thus he was ever on hand for tavern fun. He had a large and rather helpless family which he kept somewhat in retreat on a gloomy farm two miles inland; his mother old and feeble, yet ever hard-working; a large number of untidy children, and, worst of all, a sickly wife, a tall, gaunt woman who whined, and whined, and ever whined from her patch-covered couch, over the frequent desertions of her spouse to the tavern-table, and his wilful waste of money, while she could never leave the house. One night a specially good dinner was set in the Mariners’ room, roast and boiled meats, pies and puddings, a grand array of full pitchers, decanters, and bottles; the assembled group of old salts were about to ascend from the taproom to seat themselves comfortably at the round table for solid work, when a terrible crash and scream were heard, each seeming louder than the other, and before the startled eyes of the landlord and his guests, as they rushed up and into the room, there were all the steaming dishes, all the streaming bottles, with table-cloth and plates in a disorderly hopeless wreck on the floor. “Who could have done it?” “There he goes,” shouted one captain, as he ran to the window; and, surely enough, a slender man in nautical garb was seen striking out from under the sheltering walls of the ell-kitchens and sheds, and running desperately across the snowy fields. Full chase was given and the marauder finally captured; he was swung roughly around with oaths and blows, when sudden silence fell on all. It was Sam Blood’s wife in Sam Blood’s togs. “I’ll settle for this dinner,” said Sam Blood, blackly.

On his next voyage Mrs. Blood sailed with the captain. With the usual ethical inconsistencies which prevail in small communities, Mrs. Sam Blood the despoiler attracted more attention and sympathy than Mrs. Sam Blood the poor, hard-working, sickly wife; it was the universal talk and decision of all the women in town that the captain’s wife needed a change of scene; and she had to take it in that ironical form decreed to the wives of old-time ship-owners, in a voyage of uncertain length and certain discomfort on a sailing vessel, with no woman companion and the doubtful welcome of the male members of the crew. Off she went to Savannah. At that port she was no better, cried all the time (the first mate wrote home), and seemed little like the woman of spirit who had wrecked the Mariners’ dinner. The captain decided to go with a cargo to South America to see how the tropics would serve the ailing woman. His old home crew shipped back to Boston, not caring for the trip far south, and a crew of creoles and negroes was taken on the supplemental trip.

When Captain Blood and his schooner at last came into port at home, he landed with sombre countenance, a mourning widower, and soon was properly clad in trappings of woe. Mrs. Sam Blood was no more. Her husband stated briefly that she had died and was buried at sea off the island of Jamaica. A discreet and decent term of mourning passed, and Mrs. Blood, as is the way of the living – and of the dead – was quite forgotten. Once more the Mariners’ Club was to have a dinner, and once more the table in the Mariners’ room was spread with good cheer and ample drink. Captain Blood, in somewhat mitigated bereavement, was among the thronging guests who lingered over a final stomach-warmer at the bar. The landlord ran out of the room and roared down the main stairs that dinner was ready, and even as he spoke, crash! smash! came a din from the Mariners’ room, and there was all the dinner and all the broken bottles with the table-cloth and the upset table on the floor. It was a very unpleasant reminder to Sam Blood of a very mortifying event, and his friends sympathized with him in silence. This time no miscreant could be found in house or on farm, but the landlord suspected a discharged and ugly servant, who might have run down the little corner staircase, as Mrs. Blood had before him.

The ruined dinner was replaced by another a week later. The guests were gathered, the landlord was bearing a last roast pig aloft, when smash! crash! came again from the Mariners’ room. Every one in the house rushed up in tremendous excitement: the table-cloth was off, table upset, bottles smashed. An ominous silence and a sense of the uncanny fell on all in the room; some glanced askance at Sam Blood. More than one sharp-eyed old salt noted that the great, hairy, tattooed hands of the widower shook amazingly, though his face was the calmest of all the bronzed, weather-beaten figure-heads staring around.

There has never been a meal served from that table since, though many a meal has been spread on it. The landlord, a stubborn man of no nonsense and no whims, grimly nailed the legs of the table to the floor, and proceeded to set the succeeding dinner on the bare boards. It mattered not, cloth or no cloth, every dinner small or great was always wrecked. Watchers were set, enjoined not to take their eyes from the table, nor themselves from the room. Something always happened, an alarm of fire, a sudden call for help, an apparent summons from the landlord – this but for a single moment, but in that moment smash! crash! went the dinner.

Captain Blood lived to a rather lonely and unpopular old age, for he was held responsible for the decay and dissolution of the Mariners’ Club; and unjustly enough, for Neptune knows it was no wish of his. When occasional dinners and suppers were given by nautical men in wholly mundane rooms in other taverns, with no spiritual accompaniments, – that is, in the form of ghosts, – the captain was left out. Men did not hanker for the companionship of a man who left port with a wife and came home with a ghost. He has been dead for decades, and is anchored in the old Hill graveyard, where he sleeps the quiet sleep of the righteous; and the name and virtues of Elvira, his beloved wife, are amply recorded on his tombstone. But her ghost still walks, or at any rate still wrecks. I don’t like ghosts, but I really should like to meet this lively and persistent Yankee wraith, clad in the meek and meagre drooping feminine attire which was the mode in the early part of this century, or perhaps tentatively mannish in peajacket and oilskins as in her day of riot of old. I really wish I could see the spry and spiteful spirit of Mrs. Sam Blood, with her expression of rampant victory as she twitches the table-cloth off, and wrecks the bottles, and says in triumphal finality, “I’ll settle for this dinner”; thus gaining what is ever dear to a woman, even to the ghost of a woman – the last word.

Late on a November night in the early part of this century the landlord and half a dozen teamsters sat drinking deep in the taproom of the Buxton Inn. These rough travellers had driven into the yard during the afternoon with their produce-laden wagons; for a heavy snow was falling, and it was impossible wheeling, doubtful even whether they could leave the inn in forty-eight hours – perhaps not for a week. Their board would not prove very costly, for they carried their own horse-provender, and much of their own food. Some paid for a bed, others slept free of charge round the fire; but all spent money for drink. It was a fierce storm and a great fall of snow for the month of the year – though November is none too mild any year in New England. Though this snow was too early by half to be seasonable, yet each teamster was roughly merry at the others’ expense that he had not “come down” on runners.

With dull days of inaction before them there was no need for early hours of sleep, so all talked loud and long and drank boisterously, when suddenly a series of heavy knocks was heard at the front door of the inn. Bang! bang! angrily pounded the iron knocker, and the landlord went slowly into the little front entry, fumbled heavily at the bolt, and at last threw open the door to a fine young spark who blustered in with a great bank of snow which fell in at his feet, and who was covered with rolls and drifts of snow, which he shook off debonairly on all around him, displaying at last a handsome suit of garments, gold-laced, and very fine to those country bumpkins, but which a “cit” would have noted were somewhat antiquated of cut and fashion.

He at once indicated and proved his claim to being a gentleman by swearing roundly at the landlord, declaring that his horses and servant were housed ere he was, that they had driven round and found shelter in the barn before he could get into the front door. He could drink like a gentleman, too, this fine young fellow, and he entered at once into the drinking and singing and story-telling and laughing with as much zest as if he had been only a poor common country clown. At last all fell to casting dice. The stakes were low, but such as they were luck all went one way. After two hours’ rounds the gentleman had all the half-dollars and shillings, all the pennies even, in his breeches pocket; and he laughed and sneered in hateful triumph. Sobered by his losses, which were small but his all, one teamster surlily said he was going to sleep, and another added, “’Tis high time.” And indeed it was, for at that moment old Janet, the tavern housemaid, came in to begin her morning round of work, to pinch out the candles, take up part of the ashes from the chimney-hearth, fill the kitchen pots and kettles, gather in the empty bottles and glasses; and as she did so, albeit she was of vast age, she glanced with warm interest at the fine figure of fashion slapping his pockets, sneering, and drinking off his glass. “Why, master,” she said, staring, “you do be the very cut of Sir Charles off our sign-board.” “Let’s see how he looks,” swaggered the young blade; “where’s a window whence we can peep at him?” All trooped to a nigh window in the tavern parlor to look at the portrait of Sir Charles Buxton on the swing-sign, but to no avail, for there was yet but scant light without, and they peered out only on thick snowdrifts on the window panes. But when they reëntered the kitchen, lo! their gay companion was gone. Gone where? Back on the sign-board, of course. All who heard the oft and ever repeated wonder-tale would have scoffed at the fuddled notions of a drunken group of stupid teamsters, but the dollars and shillings and pennies were gone too – the devil knows where; and who was to pay the score for the double bowl of punch and the half-dozen mugs of flip Sir Charles Buxton had ordered while the dicing was going on, and a large share of which he had drunk off with all the zest of flesh and blood? Besides, Janet had seen him, and Janet’s eye for a young man could never be doubted.

I spent one night a few summers ago in a tavern haunted by the ghost of a dead past. A sudden halt in our leisurely progress from town to town, caused by a small but unsurmountable accident to our road-wagon, found us in a little Massachusetts village of few houses. The blacksmith had gone to a neighboring village to spend the night. It was twilight, and we decided not to attempt to reach our intended place for sojourning, six miles distant. We asked of a passer-by which house was the tavern. “There isn’t any,” was the cheerful answer; “if you stay here over night you’ll have to stay at the poorhouse.” Now this was rather an unalluring alternative to any self-respecting citizen, but the night was coming on, and, after vainly searching for some resident who had ever had summer boarders, we determined to investigate the poorhouse. We found it the best house in the village. It was the almshouse, but it had been for half a century a tavern in reality, when the post-road lay through the town and travellers were more frequent than to-day. There was evidence of its tavern days in the old taproom, which had been converted into a store-room. The house with twenty acres of land had been bequeathed to the town by one of the old Bourne family that had lived in it so long. This last Bourne owner was a childless widower, a St. Louis man, who had been away from the home of his youth since early childhood and had little love of it from old associations.

The poormaster and his wife we found to be tidy, respectable folk, even folk of a certain dignity, who owned the adjoining farm. Their own house had burned down. So for ten years they had run the poorhouse. It had not proved a very difficult task. Often there were no occupants; one year there were two Portuguese cranberry pickers, stricken with rheumatism from exposure in the cranberry bogs. Now both are married to American wives and own prosperous cranberry bogs of their own. The poorhouse had its usual quota on the night of our sojourn; we found two paupers living there.

There was not time to prepare an extra meal of extra quality for the travellers who came so suddenly for a night’s shelter, but the good tea, plentiful milk, fine bread and butter, honey, hot griddle-cakes, and fried bacon bore testimony of ample fare and good housewifery. The two paupers sat at the table and ate with us – a silver-haired old man of exquisite cleanliness, and a grotesque little humpback. We noted that the old man was ever addressed by all who spoke to him as Mr. Bourne, and during his short absence from the room after supper the poor-mistress told us that the almshouse had been the home and this the farm of his grandfather. The supper was served in the great kitchen, and here we sat till a curfew bell rang from the little church belfry at nine o’clock.