ercy Dexter die. Once she hinted to the child Dutee of a
somewhat peculiar circumstance in Mercy's last moments, but he had soon
forgotten all about it save that it was something peculiar. The
granddaughter, moreover, recalled even this much with difficulty. She
and her brother were not so much interested in the house as was Archer's
son Carrington, the present owner, with whom I talked after my
experience.

* * * * *

Having exhausted the Harris family of all the information it could
furnish, I turned my attention to early town records and deeds with a
zeal more penetrating than that which my uncle had occasionally shown in
the same work. What I wished was a comprehensive history of the site
from its very settlement in 1636--or even before, if any Narragansett
Indian legend could be unearthed to supply the data. I found, at the
start, that the land had been part of the long strip of home lot granted
originally to John Throckmorton; one of many similar strips beginning at
the Town Street beside the river and extending up over the hill to a
line roughly corresponding with the modern Hope Street. The Throckmorton
lot had later, of course, been much subdivided; and I became very
assiduous in tracing that section through which Back or Benefit Street
was later run. It had, as rumor indeed said, been the Throckmorton
graveyard; but as I examined the records more carefully, I found that
the graves had all been transferred at an early date to the North Burial
Ground on the Pawtucket West Road.

Then suddenly I came--by a rare piece of chance, since it was not in the
main body of records and might easily have been missed--upon something
which aroused my keenest eagerness, fitting in as it did with several of
the queerest phases of the affair. It was the record of a lease, in
1697, of a small tract of ground to an Etienne Roulet and wife. At last
the French element had appeared--that, and another deeper element of
horror which the name conjured up from the darkest recesses of my weird
and heterogeneous reading--and I feverishly studied the platting of the
locality as it had been before the cutting through and partial
straightening of Back Street between 1747 and 1758. I found what I had
half expected, that where the shunned house now stood the Roulets had
laid out their graveyard behind a one-story and attic cottage, and that
no record of any transfer of graves existed. The document, indeed, ended