Rumor said , `` Not so . '' Whenever her chill and withered heart desired warmth , she was wont to summon a black slave of Governor Shirley 's from the blurred mirror and send him in search of guests who had long ago been familiar in those deserted chambers . Forth went the sable messenger , with the starlight or the moonshine gleaming through him , and did his errand in the burial-grounds , knocking at the iron doors of tombs or upon the marble slabs that covered them , and whispering to those within , `` My mistress , old Esther Dudley , bids you to the province-house at midnight ; '' and punctually as the clock of the Old South told twelve came the shadows of the Olivers , the Hutchinsons , the Dudleys -- all the grandees of a bygone generation -- gliding beneath the portal into the well-known mansion , where Esther mingled with them as if she likewise were a shade . Without vouching for the truth of such traditions , it is certain that Mistress Dudley sometimes assembled a few of the stanch though crestfallen old Tories who had lingered in the rebel town during those days of wrath and tribulation . Out of a cobwebbed bottle containing liquor that a royal governor might have smacked his lips over they quaffed healths to the king and babbled treason to the republic , feeling as if the protecting shadow of the throne were still flung around them . But , draining the last drops of their liquor , they stole timorously homeward , and answered not again if the rude mob reviled them in the street . Yet Esther Dudley 's most frequent and favored guests were the children of the town . Toward them she was never stern . A kindly and loving nature hindered elsewhere from its free course by a thousand rocky prejudices lavished itself upon these little ones . By bribes of gingerbread of her own making , stamped with a royal crown , she tempted their sunny sportiveness beneath the gloomy portal of the province-house , and would often beguile them to spend a whole play-day there , sitting in a circle round the verge of her hoop-petticoat , greedily attentive to her stories of a dead world . And when these little boys and girls stole forth again from the dark , mysterious mansion , they went bewildered , full of old feelings that graver people had long ago forgotten , rubbing their eyes at the world around them as if they had gone astray into ancient times and become children of the past . At home , when their parents asked where they had loitered such a weary while and with whom they had been at play , the children would talk of all the departed worthies of the province as far back as Governor Belcher and the haughty dame of Sir William Phipps . It would seem as though they had been sitting on the knees of these famous personages , whom the grave had hidden for half a century , and had toyed with the embroidery of their rich waistcoats or roguishly pulled the long curls of their flowing wigs . `` But Governor Belcher has been dead this many a year , '' would the mother say to her little boy . `` And did you really see him at the province-house ? '' -- `` Oh yes , dear mother -- yes ! '' the half-dreaming child would answer . `` But when old Esther had done speaking about him , he faded away out of his chair . '' Thus , without affrighting her little guests , she led them by the hand into the chambers of her own desolate heart and made childhood 's fancy discern the ghosts that haunted there . Living so continually in her own circle of ideas , and never regulating her mind by a proper reference to present things , Esther Dudley appears to have grown partially crazed .
It was found that she had no right sense of the progress and true state XXXXX the Revolutionary war , but held a constant faith that the armies of Britain were victorious on every field and destined to be ultimately triumphant .
At Toward about as in of through to upon with