Such was the end of Tom Walker and his ill-gotten wealth. Let all griping money-brokers lay this to heart. The truth of it is not to be doubted. The very hole under the oak-trees, from whence he dug Kidd’s money, is to be seen to this day; and the neighboring swamp and old Indian fort is often haunted in stormy nights by a figure on horseback, in a morning-gown and white cap, which is doubtless the troubled spirit of the usurer. In fact, the story has resolved itself into a proverb, and is the origin of that popular saying, prevalent throughout New England, of “THE DEVIL AND TOM WALKER.” THE OLD SMOKE CHAMBER. A PICTURE OF THE MOUNT HOPE LANDS, AND THEIR LEGENDS. That the old Royall house was haunted had long been a legend in the Mount Hope lands. Nearly all of the old houses in this part of New England were haunted, or supposed to be. A house without its ghost lore would have been regarded in old colony days as a place of but little interest. Did not evil spirits tempt all good people, and frighten all wrong-doers? And what a colorless family that must have been to have been wholly neglected by the ghost-world! All old women had their ghost-stories, and not a few claimed that the “Prince of the Power of the Air” had made them, or some of their antique relatives, a special visit. There seems to have been few good spirits in those lively and dramatic old times. The Puritan imagination had no fairy-land, or Hebraic or mediæval angels. The telling of ghost-stories to children was held to be a very wholesome and pious occupation, but the relation of fairy tales would have been a sin. No historian has overdrawn these colonial superstitions. Witches walked the air, the dead did not sleep well nights, but were ever getting up out of their graves and returning to their old places to warn the living. The spirit-world of darkness was an ever-present reality, a nightly terror, and there were no angel chariots in the clouds, nor angel feet in the ways of sorrow and death. New England was a goblin-land. Going to bed in some distant chamber in an old oak house was a specially perilous journey for the young Puritan to make; one could never tell whether one’s dead grandfather was in his grave at that hour or not. Young folks with disturbed consciences went to bed with alacrity, and drew the sheets over their heads quickly, in Cotton Mather’s day. The Mount Hope lands! How beautiful they were and are! But the old houses on them were filled with dark superstitions. This is not strange, for the Mount Hope lands had been the fields of great events. Few places in America had such a romantic history. “Here once red warriors were wont to assemble, Here lurid and ghostly their council fires shone, Here the word of the chief made the ancient tribes tremble, And the war-whoop rung out from Pometacom’s throne.