waves, and gained a place in history, yet left no names. But superstition, among other legends of this mansion, repeats the wondrous tale, that on the anniversary night of Britain's discomfiture, the ghosts of the ancient governors of Massachusetts still glide through the portal of the Province House. And last of all comes a figure shrouded in a military cloak, tossing his clinched hands into the air, and stamping his iron-*shod boots upon the broad freestone steps with a semblance of feverish despair, but without the sound of a foot-tramp.
When the truth-telling accents of the elderly gentleman
were hushed, I drew a long breath and looked round the room,
striving, with the best energy of my imagination, to throw a
tinge of romance and historic grandeur over the realities of the
scene. But my nostrils snuffed up a scent of cigar-smoke,
clouds of which the narrator had emitted by way of visible
emblem, I suppose, of the nebulous obscurity of his tale.
Moreover, my gorgeous fantasies were wofully disturbed by
the rattling of the spoon in a tumbler of whiskey punch, which
Mr. Thomas Waite was mingling for a customer. Nor did it
add to the picturesque appearance of the panelled walls, that
the slate of the Brookline stage was suspended against them,
instead of the armorial escutcheon of some far-descended
governor. A stage-driver sat at one of the windows, reading
a penny paper of the day,—the "Boston Times,"—and presenting
a figure which could nowise be brought into any picture
of "Times in Boston," seventy or a hundred years ago. On
the window-seat lay a bundle, neatly done up in brown paper,
the direction of which I had the idle curiosity to read. "Miss
Susan Huggins, at the Province House." A pretty chamber-
