These considerations restored confidence to the county; and nothing remained for the good citizens but to weave the chain of mysterious circumstances attending the visitation into a web of wonderful history, and to speculate upon the character and fate of the painter and honest Ephraim. As for the latter, ingenuity was for a long time at fault, until the story of Mr. Leonidas Sterling became generally known; when an opinion, hazarded at first almost in jest, grew into a settled belief,--namely, that these twain were one and the same person, and that he who had deceived so well as the ranting preacher, had deceived still better in the semblance of the zealous quaker. The successful _fourberies_ of this modern Scapin obtained for him a higher degree of credit than he had ever won, while contracting his genius into the representation of the kings of fiction; and he was remembered and spoken of with a degree of good humour, that perhaps explained the unwillingness of his city friends to proceed rigorously against him, when his treasonable practices were discovered. As for the young Hunter, or Gilbert, as he was now universally called, he was remembered with no such favour. To be a scion of the tory family, was enough to condemn him, even although (as had been the case) he might have passed his days afar from the contamination of his brothers' example, and shared neither in their acts nor their hostile spirit. But to be an associate,--an officer of the very gang commanded by Oran,--was a sin of inexpiable die, to which a double blackness was given by his dissimulation and audacity. He had resided among them as a friend and brother, and yet was all the time playing the part of a spy and betrayer; and he had capped the climax of effrontery by taking part in the jubilee of liberty, and even profaning with hypocritical lips the sacred manifesto of Independence,--or so, at least, he would have done, but for the interruption caused by Oran's appearance. This seemed to them little short of impiety, a sacrilegious mockery, indicative as much of his contemptuous disregard of the holy instrument as of his daring character. In this spirit of indignation they proceeded to canvass his whole history, raking up every little act that could be remembered, and perverting each into a manifestation of villany; the worst of which was his attempt to carry off Captain Loring's daughter,--for so much they made of his parting interview with the young lady,--and then, being baffled in the base attempt, waylaying and attempting to murder her affianced husband. In a word, he was proved to be a monster of treason, perfidy, and ingratitude; and few had the courage, fewer still the disposition, to say a word in his defence. It must be confessed that Dr. Merribody once, in a fit of unusual generosity, declared to a whole throng of raging villagers, 'that the scoundrel was an honest man and a gentleman after all, for