village of Dogtown grew up. To-day nothing above the cellars and the walls remains, only a group of outlines showing where once some hundred families built and plowed and pastured and married and gave birth, and died. Not only a deserted, but a ruined, village in America! Stones for the archeologist, and for us the legends of those mysterious dames, a few of whom so blackened the reputation of the settlement that early historians pursed their lips and dwelt as briefly as possible upon its records.

It has remained for the tolerance of a later day to look upon this strangely vanished village, most of whose inhabitants were wholly respectable members of esteemed Gloucester families, with eyes that read pathos. The lilacs that bloom each May beside the mossy doorstone of a house that is dead; the flaming yellow lilies that we found in full July glory before a cellar wall, were planted two centuries ago by those who built to abide. Flowers mean more than stone walls. One may build a house for a temporary and utilitarian shelter, but when he sets out a lilac-bush and plants a lily bulb he has come because he loves the spot-he has come to stay. And while the homes have rotted to disappearance, the lilacs and the lilies persist.

But behind all this gentle, homely pathos hovers the sense of a world bewitched. This we should have felt had we known nothing of Dogtown's lore; but, thanks to Mr. Charles E. Mann and his little book of thirty-one pages, we were primed for witchery at its blackest.

I do not know Mr. Mann, but I do know that something should be done about him-just what, I am not prepared to say, for, happily, he has not passed into a memory and so cannot have a monument erected to it. But he is worthy a monument that should be seen of all men on Cape Ann. Only a few know his "The Story of Dogtown"; it is as obscure a little brown volume as ever saw the light of publication; but it stands as the one real record of the most incredibly vanished settlement this side

the Western cliff-dwellers. He has set down not only what facts are known about the settlement, but also the legends of the alleged witches numbered among its inhabitants.

Two isolated cellars standing near the old Dogtown Commons Road we identified as those of Judy Rhines and her aunt, Liz Tucker, the former of whom was well known as a witch. Like several others of these dames, she picked up a meager living by fortune-telling. It is said that once upon a time two boys, knowing that the chattels of a witch were ever public property, determined to prove themselves public-spirited by carrying off two of Judy's geese. Judy's tall, gaunt figure was seen in a moment, as she came shrieking and brandishing a hoe; but the retort of a goose flung full in her face so prostrated her that the boys were able to make off with their prey.

"But the historian stops just there!" protested the Wife.

"If the full story were known," said I, "I haven't a doubt we should learn that two of these stone figures are the boys, petrified for eternity by the wrath of Judy's spirit!" It was growing dark, and the Wife shivered and said, "Ugh!"

We watched a lone berry-picker wending his way down from the plateau, making our solitude the more conscious. The boulders' monstrous shapes grew more formidable in the gathering dusk.

"I'm beginning to feel things!" she whispered. Her eyes were round. At times she is very ingenuous. I felt it incumbent on me to stiffen the intellectual backbone of the party.

"Yes, there is certainly a peculiar psychological-or shall I say psychic?— reaction to the environment—” I began, and halted. The silence was getting a trifle upon one's nerves.

"Observe me carefully," urged the Artist. "If I should pass into the form of a cow, horse, yellow bird, or ape, I should want you both to be able to identify me in the barn, or the branches of a tree, or the zoo. It would aid in getting me un-bewitched."

He feels it masculine and superior thus to jeer at our feminine emotions, but I caught him suppressing a shudder.

The darkness was growing rapidly. Lean figures of junipers, the only tree that finds life in this forsaken world, grew black and shrouded in the increasing gloom. An ominous "Caw!" from time to time shrieked in our ears like some raucous curse in the voice of Judy or Tammy. Gaunt junipers, like black ghosts stalking, and the melancholy crows-these are the only inhabitants to be seen. But what witch-spirits were abroad we could only guess.

We recalled the tales of Becky Rich, and the fortune she once told in coffeegrounds, of a lover "clear across the water." Of Aunt Smith, or, as some say, Dark Tucker it was, who brewed a "dire drink" for each "ducky," as she styled her victims, uttering who knows what incantation above the kettle of spruce tops and foxberry leaves. Of the foreign snuff-box, strangely wrought and bearing the design of a full-rigged ship, found, long after her death, in Tammy's cellar, hidden for no one knows what pur

pose

Tammy Younger seems to have been the foremost practiser of black magic in Dogtown. Stories of her uncanny powers blew on the wind that swept all the surrounding settlements, and little children ran wailing to hide when she appeared. "You better be good, or Aunt Tam 'll take you up home with her," was a threat that accomplished more in the way of discipline than all the switches that ever grew. And as the children whimpered and obeyed, so did the adults confess that it "was being on the safe side not to offend Tammy." Dignified church elders drew her water when she commanded, or even fetched her a load of wood.

Tammy seems to have inherited her arts from her aunt, Luce George, who had an uncomfortable habit of bewitching the oxen, causing them to stand, running out their tongues, at the bottom of the hill below her house, and refuse to

climb until their driver had paid toll from his load of corn. Thus she applied the education she had received from his Satanic Majesty with excellent thrift. Furthermore, if she commanded a load of wood to slide from the ox-team the load obeyed, until toll again was paid. Occasionally her appetite for fish led her to the wharves below, where it was a simple matter for her to bewitch the catch of mackerel until her tribute was exacted.

"Of course we know they're all dead and gone," murmured the Wife. "Yes, of course. But isn't it queer the way that tallest juniper seems to move stealthily toward us

The world had blackened swiftly, and now against the blackness a moon was rising. Athwart the sky rode a strange form.

"To be sure, it's nothing but a cloud," said I, "but how extraordinarily it resembles a bony figure in a peaked hat! Yes, to be sure it's a cloud-these cloud effects are remarkable at times," said I, forcibly.

"To be sure," echoed the Wife, in a faint whisper.

"As I was saying," I began again, "the psychological reaction to environment is—is—is very interesting," I concluded, lamely, although fairly shouting in my effort to be impressive.

"I thought I heard a-a-a-ahem, a mosquito," observed the Artist, slapping the air ostentatiously. "Hadn't we better go now?"

"Yes indeed, yes indeed, of course we should go,' should go," we assented volubly. And our exit was marked by a surprising precipitation.

But, once more infolded by civilization in Gloucester, restored to normal by the sight of trolley-cars and summer pleasure-seekers and ice-cream sodas, the Wife raised round, infantile eyes over the rim of her soda-glass.

"I haven't shivered so deliciously since I wore pigtails!" she gloated. "When can we mount our broomsticks again?”

NORTOLA VALENCIA sat on deck,

TORA

just off the Azores, and held court. Tortola is a star, perhaps the brightest star, of interpretive dancing in Spain, although of English birth. Midnight were dawn compared to her straight, abundant hair and her great, appealing eyes. She is supple of figure yet amply voluptuous. She carries with pride a little head cut like a cameo, and her sloping shoulders, as she sits or walks, have a hint of a saucy shrug native to no other city in this world than Seville. She dresses in picture costume, sprinkled with great emeralds no deeper green than the shadows thrown in the hollows of her olive skin; and on the stage or off she holds always the spotlight.

A cotton salesman from Barcelona, a Parisian art-dealer, the Third Officerwhen he was not on watch for submarines-and a phonograph agent from Madrid formed the nucleus of her court; about them was always a fascinated fringe, male and female, listening to Tortola, who, according to the prevailing tongue in her audience, held forth indifferently in Spanish, French, or English. Her monologue ranged from cooking in all lands to high politics. When she spoke on politics and international diplomacy, she got the respectful attention which Latin people always give to the artist. That is one of their engaging little ways which we shall never quite understand. With us, and equally with the English, the eminent poet who advocates low tariff or the noted actor who bursts forth on the Irish question gets but scanty attention. With the Latins With the Latins it is different. If you paint or write or dance or sing supremely well, then have you weight in politics-hence the ex

traordinary influence of D'Annunzio in Italy.

Mostly, however, Tortola talked about her art; that was when the Anglo-Saxons among us, and especially the women, drew closer and listened. She spoke of the native Spanish dance and its changes throughout the ages, of the Greek dance, the Hindu dance, the Hawaiian interpretive dancing. In quick phrases she gave her opinion-usually generous of Isadora Duncan, of Maud Allen, of La Argentinita, of Loie Fuller, who, as a pioneer, she admired most of all.

"What about the gipsy dance?" asked one of our women on this particular afternoon. "Have you ever tried that?”

"I have tried it, madame," said La Tortola, "and failed miserably. The gipsy dance is for the strange gipsy heart. Look. I went from Madrid to Seville once to take lessons-I had a project to introduce a gipsy suite at the Royal Theater. I tried. Long days I rehearsed. But I could no more do it than"-La Tortola cast about for a simile "than one could run an automobile without petrol. The gipsy dance is locked in the gipsy heart. And the Gitanos of Spain are gipsies no longer. They live among us in towns. They marry with us. They work at trades. Only one remains-from her I took lessons.

"She is an old, old woman," continued Tortola (afterward, I say here, I met the old, old woman. She was, according to her own confession, thirty-eight and looked thirty-five, showing that age is mostly a question of latitude)-"an old, old woman, and stone deaf from her birth. She either dances by her sense of

vibration from the guitars, or she makes the guitars follow her steps-I never could be sure which. That is why they call her La Sorda-the deaf woman. The gipsy heart lives in her. She dances in a cheap den at Seville, where workingmen and soldiers go to drink their wine on Saturday nights. Yes"-in answer to a glance from one of our women-"it is a place where a foreign lady can go if she has an escort, though few Spanish ladies would. Everything is allowed to the tourist. I suppose that few tourists. have ever seen La Sorda. They go to see the Spanish dance-just pretty-so. La Sorda dances for Seville. If you wish to see her- Here" and Tortola wrote in the fly-leaf of my guide-book an address. "Go," she added, "late at night.'

Nothing, at the moment, seemed less likely than that I should visit Seville on that trip, for the western front and the spring offensive of 1917 were calling. But when I had finished the business which led me to Madrid, I found the French border closed for a week. So I traveled south to Andalusia in order to look into German influences. I had forgotten all about La Sorda until one morning when I came across that note on the fly-leaf of my guide-book; and, as always when in doubt, I consulted José. He is a useful person of many trades, this José. At the moment, he was acting mainly as courier for the Allied consulates—a document dropped into the ordinary mail during this period might as well have been despatched to the German Embassy. On the side, he was guide, interpreter, and friend to all Frenchmen, Englishmen, or Americans visiting Seville that year on official and semi-official business; still farther on the side, he would, if encouraged, do a little business with antiques whose genuineness he positively guaranteed. When he looked at you with his soft, guileless black eyes and his engaging smile you had to believe the guaranty. To José I showed that entry in my guide-book.

"Ah yes, La Sorda," said José. "I well know La Sorda. My wife, señor, is

a Gitano. She is what you call relate distant to La Sorda. Tortola speak trut'. She alone dance the gipsy dance. It is gone. My wife saw it twenty times, a hundred times, when she was a little girl. They dance it in camps, in the caves by Granada-but they are all dead, gone, except La Sorda. You go with me the señora may come too if I am there—” José beamed with fatherly patronage on my wife. "And if you go to-night, I will bring La Sorda from the stage I will what you call eentroduce her. No?"

That Saturday night at nine o'clock José guided us by narrow streets, under mysterious overhanging balconies, through the pleasant chatter of the merriest little city on this planet, to a quarter of small shops and wide-open, poor cafés where drivers, farmers, and embryo bull-fighters sipped cordial and coffee. By a brilliantly lighted doorway he led us along a narrow passage and through a plain pine door whose opening let in not only light, but the hoarse, male babble of a crowd. We were in the upper box-tier of a very small, very intimate, and very smoky theater. floor below was aligned so thickly with little, round tables that the overworked waiters were hard put to force a passage between them; and every table was rimmed with lolling, chattering young Spanish men, their clothing soiled with country mud, their dark faces looking as though they had been hacked out of mahogany with a jack-knife. The grayblue uniforms of Spanish soldiers slashed with color the dark mass of the floor. They were all young, very young; most of them mere boys, getting their first taste of life.

The

Above this floor was a row of boxes, or rather stalls, like the one we now occupied; and opposite the entrance was a very little stage, its handkerchief of an advertising curtain now lowered. In a stall across from us sat some town sport and his girl. At a corner table near the stage were four or five young women, white or saffron-colored shawls with

gaudy brocaded embroidery drawn about their sloping shoulders. These were performers, waiting for their turns, and meantime talking with favored patrons. Otherwise, except for the lady in our box, there was no woman in this man's audience.

An orchestra of guitars, whose players sat at a table before the stage, began a strumming rhythm, and the little curtain rose laboriously to show a pretty young girl in a fringed shawl, one rose lightening her midnight hair. To the guitars she danced the conventional Spanish step with its shrug of the shoulders, its stampings, its castanets, and its free, full, striding step. The curtain had not yet fallen on this turn when José, who had been out exploring, returned to our box and ushered in La Sorda.

She seemed, at first, almost commonplace. She was, indeed, rather dumpy of figure; though her step, as she came into the box, was light, she had about her no suggestion of the lithe dancer. She was dressed in her working-clothes-a plain foulard evening gown of black with a little white figure, a skimpy, fringed, white Spanish shawl about her shoulders, a pair of red-satin slippers, adorned with pompons, on her small feet. All these garments looked old and a little faded, as though they had been cleansed and recleansed. In her black hair, bound tightly about her head, was a single carnation, faded with the heat and smoke of that den.

She was dark of countenance, even more than is common in Spain, and, at first glance, her face was not striking at all, which is also uncommon among the Spanish and their adopted brethren, the gipsies. Her nose, small, straight, fine, topped a broad, expressive mouth. Her eyes were jetty black, but they had neither the languor nor the occasional flashing boldness of the regular Spanish eye. Rather were they veiled with the mystery of her race. The expression, as I read it then, had a kind of good-humored serenity. You liked the woman on first glance; but equally, you would never

I obeyed. When the waiter, having apparently prepared himself for heavy tourist trade from our box, entered with a bottle of cheap sherry and four glasses, La Sorda rose as one accustomed to serve, and poured our drinks. I had forgotten both stage and audience up to this moment. But when La Sorda raised her glass, a babble erupted on the floor below. "Eh-eh-eh-e-eh!" cried the crowd in concert, the shout ending in a long-drawn, hoarse male cry as La Sorda touched the rim with her lips. She stood at the edge of the box, laughing the frank, unaffected laughter of a child as she waved her glass toward the audience. Babble broke out again; not in concert this time, but confused-a hundred men shouting independently. Suddenly, La Sorda's laughter rippled down to a smile and her eyes fixed themselves intently on a far corner of the floor below. So she stood for an instant; then her lips began to move, though she made no sound. Again she fixed her eyes; and now she was laughing that same merry, contagious laugh.

"She reads their lips," said José. "So far away that you and I could not hear at all, she reads lips. And the old patrons have learn' to read her lips. So she talks across the place in all this noise."

La Sorda, still laughing, turned to us and spoke in Andalusian slang, with the even, unaccented voice of the stone deaf.

"The señora is dark of the complexion," said José. "The señora wears a broad hat. Of consequence they think she is Spanish and an artiste, and they ask La Sorda if she is a new dancer and will dance for us to-night. Because of which La Sorda makes a joke for them to laugh."