A tree of unknown age--the Old Elm--stood on Boston Common until within a few years. This veteran, torn and broken by many a gale and lightning-stroke, was a gallows in the last century, and Goody Glover had swung from it in witch-times. On tempestuous nights, when the boughs creaked together, it was said that dark shapes might be seen writhing on the branches and capering about the sward below in hellish glee. On a gusty autumn evening in 1776 a muffled form presented itself, unannounced, at the chamber of Mike Wild, and, after that notorious miser had enough recovered from the fear created by the presence to understand what it said to him, he realized that it was telling him of something that in life it had buried at the foot of the Old Elm. After much hesitancy Mike set forth with his ghostly guide, for he would have risked his soul for money, but on arriving at his destination he was startled to find himself alone. Nothing daunted, he set down his lantern and began to dig. Though he turned up many a rood of soil and sounded with his spade for bags and chests of gold, he found nothing. Strange noises overhead--for the wind was high and the twigs seemed to snicker eerily as they crossed each other-sent thrills along his back from time to time, and he was about to return, half in anger, half in fear, when his spirit visitor emerged from behind the tree and stood before him. The mien was threatening, the nose had reddened and extended, the hair was rumpled, and the brow was scowling. The frown of the gold monster grew more awful, the stare of his eye in the starlight more unbearable, and he was crouching and creeping as if for a spring. Mike could endure no more. He fainted, and awakened in the morning in his own chamber, where, to a neighbor who made an early call, he told--with embellishments--the story of the encounter; but before he had come to the end of the narrative the visitor burst into a roar of laughter and confessed that he had personated the supernatural visitant, having wagered a dozen bottles of wine with the landlord of the Boar's Head that he could get the better of Mike Wild. For all this the old tree bore, for many years, an evil reputation.