"Why, dear me!" cried the duke, with something almost amounting to animation. "Why, I remember the man called Hugo quite well! He was a sort of bodyservant and bodyguard of Sir Isaac. You see, Sir Isaac was in some fear of assault. He was-he was not very popular with several people. Hugo was discharged after some row or other; but I remember him well. He was a great big Hungarian fellow with great mustaches that stood out on each side of his face."

A door opened in the darkness of Harold March's memory, or, rather, oblivion, and showed a shining landscape, like that of a lost dream. It was rather a waterscape than a landscape, a thing of flooded meadows and low trees and the dark archway of a bridge. And for one instant he saw again the man with mustaches like dark horns leap up on to the bridge and disappear. "Good heavens!" he cried. "Why, I met the murderer this morning!"

Horne Fisher and Harold March had their day on the river, after all, for the little group broke up when the police arrived. They declared that the coincidence of March's evidence had cleared the whole company, and clinched the case against the flying Hugo. Whether that Hungarian fugitive would ever be caught appeared to Horne Fisher to be highly doubtful; nor can it be pretended that he displayed any very demoniac detective energy in the matter as he leaned back in the boat cushions, smoking, and watching the swaying reeds slide past.

"It was a very good notion to hop up on to the bridge," he said. "An empty boat means very little; he hasn't been seen to land on either bank, and he's walked off the bridge without walking on to it, so to speak. He's got twentyfour hours' start; his mustaches will disappear, and then he will disappear. I think there is every hope of his escape."

"Hope?" repeated March, and stopped sculling for an instant.

"Yes, hope," repeated the other. "To begin with, I'm not going to be exactly consumed with Corsican revenge because somebody has killed Hook. Perhaps you may guess by this time what Hook was. A damned blood-sucking blackmailer was that simple, strenuous, self-made captain of industry. He had secrets against nearly everybody; one against poor old Westmoreland about an early marriage in Cyprus that might have put the duchess in a queer position; and one against Harker about some flutter with his client's money when he was a young solicitor. That's why they went to pieces when they found him murdered, of course. They felt as if they'd done it in a dream. But I admit I have another reason for not wanting our Hungarian friend actually hanged for the murder."

"And what is that?" asked his friend. "Only that he didn't commit the murder," answered Fisher.

Harold March laid down the oars and let the boat drift for a moment.

"Do you know, I was half expecting something like that," he said. "It was quite irrational, but it was hanging about in the atmosphere, like thunder in the air."

"On the contrary, it's finding Hugo guilty that's irrational," replied Fisher. "Don't you see that they're condemning him for the very reason for which they acquit everybody else? Harker and Westmoreland were silent because they found him murdered, and knew there were papers that made them look like the murderers. Well, so did Hugo find him murdered, and so did Hugo know there was a paper that would make him look like the murderer. He had written it himself the day before."

in the morning. The crime was not committed on the island."

March stared at the shining water without replying, but Fisher resumed like one who had been asked a question:

"Every intelligent murder involves taking advantage of some one uncommon feature in a common situation. The feature here was the fancy of old Hook for being the first man up every morning, his fixed routine as an angler, and his annoyance at being disturbed. The murderer strangled him in his own house after dinner on the night before, carried his corpse, with all his fishing tackle, across the stream in the dead of night, tied him to the tree, and left him there under the stars. It was a dead man who sat fishing there all day. Then the murderer went back to the house, or, rather, to the garage, and went off in his motor car. The murderer drove his own motor car."

Fisher glanced at his friend's face and went on. "You look horrified, and the thing is horrible. But other things are

horrible too. If some obscure man had been hag-ridden by a blackmailer and had his family life ruined, you wouldn't think the murder of his persecutor the most inexcusable of murders. Is it any worse when a whole great nation is set free as well as a family? By this warning to Sweden we shall probably prevent war and not precipitate it, and save many thousand lives rather more valuable than the life of that viper. Oh, I'm not talking sophistry or seriously justifying the thing, but the slavery that held him and his country was a thousand times less justifiable. If I'd really been sharp I should have guessed it from his smooth, deadly smiling at dinner that night. Do you remember that silly talk about how old Isaac could always play his fish? In a pretty hellish sense he was a fisher of men."

Harold March took the oars and began to row again.

"I remember," he said, "and about how a big fish might break the line and get away."

IN

N May, 1653, a group of colonists, sensible, far-seeing men of English extraction, petitioned the General Court in Boston to define the boundaries of their township, and to give it a proper designation.

Whereas the name of this plantation at present being Strabery Banke, accidentally soe called by reason of a banke where straberies were found, we now humbly desire to have it called Portsmouth, being a name most suitable for this place, it being the river's

mouth, and good as any in this land.

So was the city of Portsmouth duly christened, and the old Arcadian title, Strawberry Banke, set aside as unfit for a workaday world, for a community which aspired to wealth and distinction, which built itself substantial and beautiful homes, and acquired, as Mr. Aldrich pleasantly puts it, "a liking for first mortgage bonds." Even as Strawberry Banke the settlement was one of importance and dignity. The pioneers sent over from England by the Laconia Company in 1623 and 1631 "to found a plantation on Piscataqua River, to cultivate the vine, discover mines, carry on the fisheries, and trade with the natives," were fairly well equipped for their multitudinous duties. They built the "Great House" on Water Street which had an estate of a thousand acres. John Mason, the head and front of the Laconia Company, an able and enterprising man whom death took too soon, sent them the best cattle and horses that had yet reached New England. If the earth was virgin of ore, and the climate hostile to grapes, the fisheries thrived, and trade was good. If the little graveyard at Odiorne's Point (the oldest in New Hampshire) filled rapidly in the

first winters, the survival of the fittest insured a population which the harshness of nature was powerless to subdue.

Five years after Mason's death, the settlers of Strawberry Banke established a government of their own on the simplest possible lines, and elected Francis Williams to be their chief magistrate. But they were too few, too weak, too inexperienced for self-protection; and willingly, though not without misgivings, permitted Massachusetts to extend her jurisdiction over their domain. A mighty help was Massachusetts in times of trouble, but a trifle exacting in times of peace. The Strawberry Bankers were for the most part members of the Church of England, with no taste for Puritanism, and no aspirations toward its uncompromising ideals. This does not mean that they were licensed libertines like the settlers of Merry Mount, the legend of whose Maypole has figured scandalously scandalously in history and fiction. Maypole dancing was to them, as to all sedate colonists, an unseemly diversion. But they wore gay clothes, liked cheerful company, and let their hair grow long after the English fashion-"a thing uncivil and unmanly," declared the closecropped Puritan magistrates, "whereby men do deform themselves, and offend sober and honest citizens, and do corrupt good manners."

The stern exigencies of pioneer life made the best cement for holding together the groups of early settlers, obliterating their points of difference, and hardening them into an indissoluble whole. Thus the ever-present dangers of the wilderness compelled the township of Portsmouth to offer, in 1662, a bounty of five pounds for the head of

every wolf killed within its jurisdiction. And in the same year the steady pressure of Puritanism induced the town meeting to pass an ordinance, demanding that "a cage be made, or some other means invented by the selectmen to punish such as sleepe or take tobacco on the Lord's day, out of the meetinge, in the time of publique service." The village pump made a perfectly good whipping post, and saved timber and trouble, until the increase of malefactors, which kept pace with the increase of wealth, made it necessary to provide them with a place of punishment which would better represent the majesty and terrors of the law. There was little sympathy wasted upon offenders in those rough years of struggle, nor for a century to come. The settlers were too dependent upon one another's honesty and good will to tolerate violence or theft. As late as 1764 a white woman was whipped in Portsmouth for stealing a pair of children's shoes; and the weekly Gazette, instead of drawing comparisons between New Hampshire and Siberia, or waxing poignant over the possible needs of a possible child for those pathetic little shoes, rejoiced with fervid incoherence that jus tice had been done:

Last Friday one of our female pilferers received a flagellation at the whipping post, who had a great number of spectators to see this good work performed. It is hoped that others who so justly deserve it will soon be brought to the same place to receive their deserts.

Four years later, Portsmouth was taught a lesson in humanity which she never forgot. Ruth Blay, a girl of decent parentage and fair education, was hanged for infanticide. She rode to the gallows bravely dressed in silk, but frenzied by fear, and "shrieking dismally." Efforts bad been made to obtain a reprieve on the ground that the child, whose existence she had striven to hide, had been, as she affirmed, stillborn. Even at the last hour, the crowd in the street hoped feverishly for some word from the governor, and besought

the sheriff, Thomas Packer, to delay the execution. But this man, hungry, it is said, for his dinner, bade his assistants make haste and draw away the cart. Twenty minutes later came a messenger bearing the reprieve. The pitifulness of the tragedy, the rankling thought that the poor girl might, after all, have been innocent, and the lack of mercy shown her, aroused the anger of the mob. They besieged the sheriff's house, and solaced their souls by hanging him in effigy before his own front door. On the rude scaffold which they built was this inscription:

Am I to lose my dinner,

This woman for to hang?
Come, draw away the cart, my boys,
Don't stop to say amen.

The story of Ruth Blay became to Portsmouth what the story of Skipper Ireson was destined forty years later to become to Marblehead, a town tradition, told to generations of children, and the subject of a lamentable ballad by Albert Laighton, which established the young woman's innocence as authoritatively in the public mind as Whittier's ballad established the skipper's guilt.

It was not only in matters of discipline that Portsmouth followed her Puritan neighbors' lead. Before the "cage" was completed, and fitted with substantial stocks for the correction of Sabbath breakers, the selectmen-who did not eat the bread of idleness-had been empowered to "lay out the hiwase for the towen"; and also to provide "an abell scollmaster, as the law directs, not visious in conversation." The picturesque variants in the spelling of the town clerk, his heroic enlargement of certain words and merciless curtailment of others, leave us in occasional doubt as to what really happened. But we know that the "abell scollmaster," Mr. Thomas Phippes, was secured in 1697, and put to work, "teaching the inhabitants children for this yr insewing, in such manner as other scollmasters yously doe throughout the countrie."

The Annals of Portsmouth, published by Nathaniel Adams in 1825, are full of interesting, and possibly accurate, information. From them Charles Brewster drew largely for his prolix Rambles About Portsmouth. From them Thomas Bailey Aldrich picked with discriminating art the choicest paragraphs in his Old Town by the Sea. From them Joseph Foster took some pleasant odds and ends for the Portsmouth Guide Book. A vast deal has been written about this historic little city; but Adams is the fountainhead, the original source of supplies. He tells us in his preface that he obtained "much valuable information from aged and intelligent persons"; which, it may be remembered, was the method employed by Froissart, and Philippe de Comines, and other old chroniclers who wrote engaging and unforgettable histories. His volume, beautifully printed by "C. Norris," at Exeter, is comely to look upon. A hundred years ago the printers of Exeter must have put their souls into their work, and it stands to their credit now.

It was a stout-hearted, strong-bodied race who built the substantial homes of Portsmouth. They knew the perils of the deep, the perils of savage warfare, the perils of ice-bound winters, of wild beasts, of devastating pestilence. They seem to have been almost as indestructible as their walls. After an Indian raid in the summer of 1696, Mary Brewster, wife of John Brewster, was found lying in the road, scalped and seemingly dead, her skull fractured by a tomahawk. She was a young woman, far advanced in pregnancy. Her neighbors, remembering how, two years before, Ursula Cutt, widow of Pres. John Cutt, had been murdered by red men in the fields of Wentworth farm, laid the bleeding body on a bed, swore vengeance, and condoled with her husband, before discovering that life was not extinct. A doctor was summoned, and the victim recovered from her hurts. She was safely delivered of her child, had four other sons ("Bring forth men children

only"!), and lived to be eighty-one, the fractured skull closed by a silver plate and covered decently with a wig. It took more than a scalping knife and a tomahawk to destroy our vigorous progenitors; but the bounty of a hundred pounds offered thirty years later for every Indian's scalp tells its tale of balanced savagery. In the matter of pitifulness there was little to choose between red and white, though the white men kept the records.

That there was, however, a gentle and reasonable strain in the English colonists of New Hampshire is shown by their kindness to their slaves, and by their easy disregard of witchcraft. The Portsmouth slaveholders allowed their negroes a modified form of self-government, and found them anything but lenient to one another's transgressions. It was slavery under its most genial aspect, permitting human relations, and sometimes a sense of justice. When Gen. William Whipple rode off with the first New Hampshire brigade to oppose General Burgoyne in 1777, his servant, Prince, manifested a decided reluctance to accompany him. Reproached for his cowardice, he answered plainly, "Master, you fight for your liberty, but I have none to fight for." "Prince," retorted the general, "you do your duty like a freeman, and a freeman you shall be." This was enough. Brave, but probably discreet (for he escaped unscathed), the negro went through the war by the white man's side, and lived for twenty years afterward, enjoying his freedom, and an agreeable reputation for valor.

The somber tragedy of Salem witchcraft was softened in Portsmouth to a fantastic trickery, more suggestive of Puck than of Satan. We have Cotton Mather's word for it that in June, 1682, a shower of stones, flung by unseen hands, fell upon Newcastle (then part of Portsmouth), which stones were hot to the touch, and broke many windows, but injured only one man, who was a Quaker and merited his misfortune.