t themselves a small
cluster of huts, and a church wherein to worship; and there for a while
they dwelt, earning a precarious livelihood from the ungenerous soil
upon which they had established themselves._

_As may be supposed, the presence of so strange a people was
entertained with no great degree of complaisance by the vicinage, and
at last an old deed granting Pick-a-Neck-a-Sock to Captain Isaiah
Applebody was revived by the heirs of that renowned Indian-fighter,
whereupon the Free Grace Believers were warned to leave their bleak and
rocky refuge for some other abiding-place. Accordingly, driven forth
into the world again, they embarked in the snow[1] "Good Companion," of
Bristol, for the Province of Pennsylvania, and were afterwards heard of
no more in those parts. Their vacated houses crumbled away into ruins,
and their church tottered to decay._

[Footnote 1: A two-masted square-rigged vessel.]

_So at the beginning of these events, upon the narrative of which the
author now invites the reader to embark together with himself._

I

HOW THE DEVIL HAUNTED THE MEETING-HOUSE

At the period of this narrative the settlement of New Hope had grown
into a very considerable seaport town, doing an extremely handsome
trade with the West Indies in cornmeal and dried codfish for sugar,
molasses, and rum.

Among the more important citizens of this now wealthy and elegant
community, the most notable was Colonel William Belford--a magnate at
once distinguished and honored in the civil and military affairs of the
colony. This gentleman was an illegitimate son of the Earl of
Clandennie by the daughter of a surgeon of the Sixty-seventh Regiment
of Scots, and he had inherited a very considerable fortune upon the
death of his father, from which he now enjoyed a comfortable
competency.

Our Colonel made no little virtue of the circumstances of his exalted
birth. He was wont to address his father's memory with a sobriety that
lent to the fact of his illegitimacy a portentous air of seriousness,
and he made no secret of the fact that he was the friend and the
confidential correspondent of the present Earl of Clandennie. In his
intercourse with the several Colonial governors he assumed an attitude
of authority that only his lineage could have supported him in
maintaining, and, possessing a large and commanding presence, he bore
himself with a continent reserve that never failed to inspire with awe
those whom he saw fit to favor