Oakland Farm, as we have said, lay some miles from the great highway, and Lindsay was glad to find with how much ease he recollected the turnings and windings of the by-roads. It even gave him pleasure to recognise a glen at the bottom of a ravine thickly shaded with crooked and moss-grown trees, where half a century ago a woman had been guilty of infanticide, and whose subsequent execution at the county town is talked of still; it being apparently as well remembered as an event of yesterday. The dogwood and the wild grape vine still canopied the fatal spot, for the thicket had never been cleared away, nor the ground cultivated. A little beyond, the road lay through a dark piece of woods that countrywomen, returning late from the store, were afraid to ride through after night-fall; as their horses always started and trembled and laid back their ears at the appearance of a mysterious white colt, which was frequently seen gamboling among the trees, and which no sensible people believed to be a real or living colt, as one horse is never frightened at the sight of another. Shortly after, our traveller stopped for a few moments to gaze at the transformation of a building on the verge of a creek. He had remembered it as a large old house chequered with bricks alternately blackish and reddish, and having dark red window-shutters with holes cut in them to admit the light; some of the apertures being in the form of hearts, others in the shape of crescents. There had been a red porch, and a red front door which for years had the inconvenient property of bursting open in the dead of night; at which time, a noise was always heard as of the hoofs of a calf trotting in the dark, about the rooms up stairs. This calf was finally spoken to by a very courageous stranger, who inquired its name. The calf made not a word of answer, but from that night was heard no more. This house, being now painted yellow, and the red shutters removed, had been altered into an establishment for carding and spinning wool, as was evident by surrounding indications, and by the noise of the machinery, which could be heard plainly as far as the road. Lindsay began to fear that he should never again see Polly Nichols, a tall, gaunt, hard-featured spinning girl, whose untiring strength and immoveable countenance, as she ran all day at the "big wheel," had often amazed him, and whom Mrs. Hilliard considered as the princess of wool-spinners. His conscience reproached him with having one day, while she was at dinner, mischievously stolen the wheel-finger of the said Polly Nichols, and hidden it in the dough trough, thereby occasioning a long search to the industrious damsel, and the loss of an hour's spinning to Mrs. Hilliard.