Shouting in scornful laughter, the soldiers departed and were off for Cape Breton.

One day while they waited in camp, a crow appeared above their heads. The bird did not fly off at a "Shoo!" nor yet at a chorus of "Shoos!" but persisted in its strange circlings and darts toward them.

""Tis a bird of evil omen!" worried the soldiers, and a few vain shots were fired.

Suddenly, "Faith! it must be Peg!" cried one, and the group agreed. Peg, to be sure, in one of her ready disguises. But what was to be done?

A hurried conference was held. It was well known that only a bullet of silver or gold could put an end to a witch. Quickly one of the soldiers produced a silver sleeve-button. No time must be lost; he rammed it into his gun, fired; the bird fell, its leg broken.

But not until their return to Gloucester did the soldiers have full verification of their belief. There in the "Garrison house" lay Peg the witch, crippled, powerless to mount her broomstick, by virtue of a serious fracture; it turned out that she had fallen, apparently without cause, and broken her leg at the exact moment when the crow was shot, and

that the attending doctor had been astounded upon discovering in the wound a silver sleeve-button..

We remained long enough in Gloucester to hear the legend of those strange beings, wearing the likeness of French and Indians, who tormented the town during the days of witchcraft, always vanishing when fired upon, even after they had been seen to fall dead, concerning whom the Rev. John Emerson declared, "All rational persons will be satisfied that the devil and his angels were the cause of all that befell the town."

"If you're looking up witches," said every one, "of course you'll visit the Witch House at Pigeon Cove."

Old far-eyed seafaring men said it, and housewives in checkered aprons, and barefooted little boys carrying strings of fish, and little girls with pails of blueberries. These, in brief, are the native population of the Cape. And partly because, as the Artist argued, "there must be some fire where there's such a lot of smoke, especially from brimstone," and partly because the name “Pigeon Cove" inveigled these two friends of mine as it had long ago inveigled me, beyond mortal power to resist, we took our way out to the wee village that tips the Cape.

It was all of a July morning, and in blithe malice of heart we pictured our city-dwelling friends as we had lately been, steaming between brick walls, blown by the electric fan's disturbance of smelly air-while the Cape Ann wind swept in upon us like the glinting beat of mighty wings through sunlight.

We closed our eyes to give ourselves the more fully to it, and leaned back, and were swept by it-swept in body, in brain, in spirit.

"That wind," murmured the Wife, shutting her eyes tighter to see it more clearly, "that wind is golden, and rose, and fire-blue, and purple as royalty, and burning green. It's like the colors in a flame, or in ice, or in the rainbow-"

"How dare you!" I broke in. "Please

VOL. CXL.-No. 835.-2

remember, my dear, you are the practical member of our company!"

"All the same- -!" she defied me, and wagged her head.

And I knew that it was "all the same." Whether the eye carries over its impression to the feel of that wind I can't say, but it is true that I have never yet opened my soul to its renewing without seeing a riot of glorious color. The little peninsula is a kaleidoscope; miles of vividly green lawns, and oaks, beeches, elms, and maples whirled past; hundreds of brightly white little houses with green shutters; countless blue larkspurs and red hollyhocks and pink ramblers and yellow marigolds and creamy honeysuckle and the glowing, broken colormedley of phlox, sweet peas, petunias, verbenas. Color, color everywhere, and a passion of blooming such as I have never seen this side of California-an outflinging into life, turbulent, reckless, living for sheer delight in living. Rosevines tumble up to the roof of a veranda and bloom themselves to what would seem exhaustion, strangely suggestive of tropical abandon here in this granite northland. Meantime the wild scents deluge this rainbow air, mingling with the garden fragrances and that of cut hay to form the headiest mixture, I believe, that this north Atlantic coast anywhere brews. Wild roses, sweet fern, bayberrry-bushes are all the while pouring forth their—

"Spare us nectar,' for sweet pity's sake!" pleaded the Artist, glancing over my shoulder at my notes.

"Then provide a substitute!" I challenged him, and silence fell.

As a matter of fact, in all the summers that I have known Ann and have been enchanted by her temperament, that temperament has always proved incomprehensible to me-no doubt all the more enchanting for that. Headstrong, fiercely ardent, she seems a changeling in the family of staid old Massachusetts. She is an untamed daughter, ever spurning the sober rule of the fireside, decking herself in wanton loveliness, and fling

ing herself forth in triumphant surrender to the mystery of the sea's embrace.

Far out toward the end we found the house of our seeking. From the point of road where we approached we could catch but a flash of its red roof's corner, like a bird-breast flickering in depths; as secret as its own true story, the house buries itself in the shadow of enfolding trees. We gave ourselves to the lane's windings, and of a sudden the house stepped forth to meet us.

"Whew!" breathed the Artist, and struggled to control his adjectives. "As you will say in your immortal work," he observed, unfairly, to me, “it beggars description!"

The old brown house gazed forth upon us, very wise and tolerant from the height of its sage centuries; but its manner was of gentle aloofness, as of one who keeps his own counsel. And this, as subsequent investigation has proved, was characteristic. It considers its past no one else's affair. Modern historical methods, with all their impertinence, have never yet ferreted out the truth.

Under the beetling brows of the upper story we sought entrance. The door-step is worn to a trough; on either side of it a weather-gray little old bench sits rigidly, and sentinel hollyhocks stand at attention.

We knocked, and waited in a hush. The silence deepened. The trolley-car, that vandal destroyer of ancient spells, had vanished; the birds for unknown reason ceased their calling, the wind waited, no mortal stirred.

"If the latch should click"- began the Wife in a hoarse faintness-"and a black cat's glittering eyes should appear —and then a terrible old woman with a bony forefinger

"Come in!" we heard, remotely. Sitting in her kitchen alone, very snowy and gentle and smiling, was our hostess. "You'll excuse me not getting up, won't you? But I'm too lame to come to the door," she apologized, and then she bent to stroke the cat, and it wasn't a black and evil-eyed beast at all, but a

meek little spotted tabby, anxiously preoccupied with motherhood.

"If this is the witch," I whispered, "let the spell never be broken!" "There's chairs enough," she was inviting, with a wave of her hospitable hand. "What do I know about the house? Nothing, except that it was built in sixteen ninety-two, and that two young men from Salem Villagesome say Proctor was their namepicked out this spot to bring their mother, to hide her when she was accused of witchcraft. They built the original part of the house-those two rooms and the two above-right off, and the new part was added on about a hundred and fifty years ago. There's seven outside doors, she observed with a headshake that I fancy commented upon seven door-steps to be swept.

We entered the old rooms, and saw the low, hand-made beams spanning the ceiling; saw the ingle-nook of the deep old fireplace; saw the sturdy walls, the pegs of early fashioning. There in that hidden dwelling we saw, too, the wild little drama-that flight by night, the terrified, helpless woman clinging to the stalwart sons, the exhaustion of panic and travel, the sanctuary found here where for miles around scarcely a house was to be seen. Then the wrenching of stone from the earth's clutch, of trees from the forest's, for that first rude but lasting shelter; the friendships with wild things-foxes, deer, beavers, birdsdumb little neighbors that brought no accusations, threatened no tortures, as lettered neighbors, God-professing neighbors had done. . . .

From end to end of the village of Pigeon Cove this story is told. Not a single proof of its verity seems to exist, and yet so fixed is it in the belief of the people that one finds it impossible not to fall in with the general accept

ance.

"I want to believe it!" declared the Wife, which, in the last analysis, is perhaps the best reason for any faith, after all.

"I suppose very few strangers ever hunt out this place as we have done," observed the Artist, smugly.

"Oh dear me! They say it averages twenty a week in the season that tries to get the real-estate agents to get it away from us for a tea-room," smiled our hostess. "They think the house would bring business."

And we departed uttering execrations upon feminine enterprise and its ruthless conversion of every lovely legend into tea-room profits. With human inconsistency we cursed the very cups that, in our thirstier hours, we are wont to bless.

"But the best of all lies ahead!" I gloated.

And so we set out for that plateau in the center of the Cape, known as Dogtown Common. Never was appellation so inadequate; led by a name suggesting nothing more impressive than a frontier mining-camp, one approaches a lost world as charged with mystery, as infernally splendid, as some wilderness of Arizona, New Mexico, or southern Utah. Forgotten gods have upheaved the earth with a finger's movement, their commands echo through space, the silence groans and obeys.

It was the beginning of twilight when we wound up the road of approach. The last far-off bell and horn borne on an Annisquam wind had died; we hung in the suspense of a deathly stillness. A final turn in the lonely road, and the pleateau lay before us.

It was so long before we spoke that at last the sound of our own voices almost frightened us, as though they broke something meant to be held unbroken, eternally.

"We are in the true home of the witches at last!" I said, and then started, and lowered my voice. It was as though the spot were new to me. I believe each summer will bring its impression afresh. "Our broomsticks have reached their goal!"

Yes, they had borne us unerringly to

the very dwelling-place of all the powers of darkness. Before us lay those few miles which some curious optical trick ever transforms into an endlessly vast plateau, isolate, forsaken, save by the. stone monsters of a history eons old. Geologists tell their story, tracing it from the plunge of a glacial torrent, which flung these gigantic boulders as an angry child flings pebbles, down through the ages in which frost and storm have chiseled them to the monstrous shapes of prehistoric beasts and birds and reptiles. But to us of less scientific mind they were the spellbound victims of those ancient dames whose dwellings have long since crumbled to earth, but whose shades arise at the mere utterance of such names as "Judy Rhines," "Easter Carter," "Granny Rich," "Luce George," and "Tammy Younger, the Queen of the Witches."

A New World Salisbury Plain some have seen in this plateau, or a vista of the West, or a Lord Dunsany play. Druidic ruin, or forgotten garden of the gods, or theater set in terrible splendor, it matters little. The astonishing fact remains that here, in the very midst of familiar New England, lies a spot almost never visited by the traveler, little known even to the native; and that this spot is a wonder-world such as one might expect to find snap-shotted and jitneyed to banality.

"Here's where you leave me!" cried the Artist, flushed by a fever of heste, snatching pencil and sketch-book. "My first attack shall be made upon the ichthyosaur yonder. After which I shall down the teleosaur, the dinosaur, the dinothere, and the moa, one by one."

"When his chest heaves like that," said the Wife, "and his eye takes on that glitter, it is best to withdraw."

Therefore we left him where he had sunk all unwittingly into the clinging arms of a blackberry-bush, from which we extracted him as painlessly as possible later on.

We walked to the sagging cellar walls where, about two hundred years ago, the

village of Dogtown grew up. To-day nothing above the cellars and the walls remains, only a group of outlines showing where once some hundred families built and plowed and pastured and married and gave birth, and died. Not only a deserted, but a ruined, village in America! Stones for the archeologist, and for us the legends of those mysterious dames, a few of whom so blackened the reputation of the settlement that early historians pursed their lips and dwelt as briefly as possible upon its records.

It has remained for the tolerance of a later day to look upon this strangely vanished village, most of whose inhabitants were wholly respectable members of esteemed Gloucester families, with eyes that read pathos. The lilacs that bloom each May beside the mossy doorstone of a house that is dead; the flaming yellow lilies that we found in full July glory before a cellar wall, were planted two centuries ago by those who built to abide. Flowers mean more than stone walls. One may build a house for a temporary and utilitarian shelter, but when he sets out a lilac-bush and plants a lily bulb he has come because he loves the spot-he has come to stay. And while the homes have rotted to disappearance, the lilacs and the lilies persist.

But behind all this gentle, homely pathos hovers the sense of a world bewitched. This we should have felt had we known nothing of Dogtown's lore; but, thanks to Mr. Charles E. Mann and his little book of thirty-one pages, we were primed for witchery at its blackest.

I do not know Mr. Mann, but I do know that something should be done about him-just what, I am not prepared to say, for, happily, he has not passed into a memory and so cannot have a monument erected to it. But he is worthy a monument that should be seen of all men on Cape Ann. Only a few know his "The Story of Dogtown"; it is as obscure a little brown volume as ever saw the light of publication; but it stands as the one real record of the most incredibly vanished settlement this side

the Western cliff-dwellers. He has set down not only what facts are known about the settlement, but also the legends of the alleged witches numbered among its inhabitants.

Two isolated cellars standing near the old Dogtown Commons Road we identified as those of Judy Rhines and her aunt, Liz Tucker, the former of whom was well known as a witch. Like several others of these dames, she picked up a meager living by fortune-telling. It is said that once upon a time two boys, knowing that the chattels of a witch. were ever public property, determined to prove themselves public-spirited by carrying off two of Judy's geese. Judy's tall, gaunt figure was seen in a moment, as she came shrieking and brandishing a hoe; but the retort of a goose flung full in her face so prostrated her that the boys were able to make off with their prey. "But the historian stops just there!" protested the Wife.

"If the full story were known,” said I, "I haven't a doubt we should learn that two of these stone figures are the boys, petrified for eternity by the wrath of Judy's spirit!" It was growing dark, and the Wife shivered and said, "Ugh!"

We watched a lone berry-picker wending his way down from the plateau, making our solitude the more conscious. The boulders' monstrous shapes grew more formidable in the gathering dusk.

"I'm beginning to feel things!" she whispered. Her eyes were round. At times she is very ingenuous. I felt it incumbent on me to stiffen the intellectual backbone of the party.

"Yes, there is certainly a peculiar psychological or shall I say psychic?— reaction to the environment-" I began, and halted. The silence was getting a 'rifle upon one's nerves.

"Observe me carefully," urged the Artist. "If I should pass into the form of a cow, horse, yellow bird, or ape, I should want you both to be able to identify me in the barn, or the branches of a tree, or the zoo. It would aid in getting me un-bewitched."