poor heir, and how he had suffered from this; but one night, when they
left him senseless, he contrived to make his escape from that cruel
home, bleeding as he went; and how, by some action of his imagination,
--his sense of the cruelty and hideousness of such treatment at his
brethren's hands, and in the holy name of his religion,--his foot,
which had been crushed by their cruelty, bled as he went, and that
blood had never been stanched. And thus he had come to America, and
after many wanderings, and much track of blood along rough ways, to New
England. [Endnote: 3.]

"And what became of his beloved?" asked the grim Doctor, who was
puffing away at a fresh pipe with a very queer aspect.

"She died in England," replied the schoolmaster. "And before her death,
by some means or other, they say that she found means to send him a
child, the offspring of their marriage, and from that child our race
descended. And they say, too, that she sent him a key to a coffin, in
which was locked up a great treasure. But we have not the key. But he
never went back to his own country; and being heart-broken, and sick
and weary of the world and its pomps and vanities, he died here, after
suffering much persecution likewise from the Puritans. For his peaceful
religion was accepted nowhere."

"Of all legends,--all foolish legends," quoth the Doctor, wrathfully,
with a face of a dark blood-red color, so much was his anger and
contempt excited, "and of all absurd heroes of a legend, I never heard
the like of this! Have you the key?"

"No; nor have I ever heard of it," answered the schoolmaster.