gilt braid, his hat cocked upon one side of his bony head,
pleasing himself with the belief that he was the object of universal
admiration, and swelling with a vast and consummate self-satisfaction
as he boasted, with strident voice and extravagant enunciation, of the
magnificence of the palace he was building.

At the same time, having, as he said, shingles to spare, he patched and
repaired the Old Free Grace Meeting-House, so that its gray and hoary
exterior, while rejuvenated as to the roof and walls, presented in a
little while an appearance as of a sudden eruption of bright yellow
shingles upon its aged hide. Nor would our Captain offer any other
explanation for so odd a freak of fancy than to say that it pleased him
to do as he chose with his own.

At last, the great house having been completed, and he himself having
entered into it and furnished it to his satisfaction, our Captain
presently began entertaining his friends therein with a profuseness of
expenditure and an excess of extravagance that were the continued
admiration of the whole colony. In more part the guests whom Captain
Obadiah thus received with so lavish an indulgence were officers or
government officials from the garrisons of Newport or of Boston, with
whom, by some means or other, he had scraped an acquaintance. At times
these gay gentlemen would fairly take possession of the town, parading
up and down the street under conduct of their host, staring ladies out
of countenance with the utmost coolness and effrontery, and offering
loud and critical remarks concerning all that they beheld about them,
expressing their opinions with the greatest freedom and jocularity.

Nor were the orgies at Belford's Palace limited to such extravagances
as gaming and dicing and drinking, for sometimes the community would be
scandalized by the presence of gayly dressed and high-colored ladies,
who came, no one knew whence, to enjoy the convivialities at the great
house on the hill, and concerning whom it pleased the respectable folk
of New Hope to entertain the gravest suspicion.

At first these things raised such a smoke that nothing else was to be
seen, but by-and-by other strange and singular circumstances began to
be spoken of--at first among the common people, and then by others. It
began to be whispered and then to be said that the Old Free Grace
Meeting-House out on the Point was haunted by the Devil.

The first information concerning this dreadful obsessi