A few years later another son came--the "brother John" whose wit and talents have gladdened so many hearts--and, last of all, another daughter came to brighten the family circle for a few brief years. The little Oliver was a bright, sunny-tempered child, highly imaginative and extremely sensitive. Speaking of his childhood in after years, and of certain superstitious fancies that always clung to him, he says: "I tell you it was not so pleasant for a little boy of impressible nature to go up to bed in an old gambrel-roofed house, with untenanted, locked upper chambers, and a most ghostly garret; ... There was a dark store-room, too, on looking through the keyhole of which I could dimly see a heap of chairs and tables and other four-footed things, which seemed to me to have rushed in there frightened, and in their fright to have huddled together and climbed up on each other's backs--as the people did in that awful crush where so many were killed at the execution of Holloway and Haggerty. Then the lady's portrait up-stairs with the sword-thrusts through it--marks of the British officers' rapiers--and the tall mirror in which they used to look at their red coats--confound them for smashing its mate!--and the deep, cunningly-wrought arm-chair in which Lord Percy used to sit while his hair was dressing; he was a gentleman, and always had it covered with a large _peignoir_ to save the silk covering my grandmother embroidered. Then the little room down-stairs from which went the orders to throw up a bank of earth on the hill yonder where you may now observe a granite obelisk, the study in my father's time, but in those days the council-chamber of armed men, sometimes filled with soldiers. Come with me, and I will show you the 'dents' left by the butts of their muskets all over the floor. With all these suggestive objects round me, aided by the wild stories those awful country boys that came to live in our service brought with them--of contracts written in blood and left out over night not to be found the next morning (removed by the Evil One who takes his nightly round among our dwellings, and filed away for future use), of dreams coming true, of death-signs, of apparitions, no wonder that my imagination got excited, and I was liable to superstitious fancies." What some of these fancies were, he tells us elsewhere: