Concerning their presence. Nothing in our early annals has seemed more remarkable than the preservation of this secret from the knowledge of those whose interest it was to obtain it, by the many who knew, and the many more who must have suspected the hiding place of the fugitives.
All my life I had admired the courage, the wisdom, the stoutly preserved reticence of the Rev. John Russell, of Hadley, Massachusetts in whose house the Regicides lay for the larger part of their last thirteen or fourteen years of hiding. My grandmother used to tell a tradition concerning the Rev. Mr. Russell's protection of Goffe and Whalley which — as I have not found trace of it elsewhere — may well be a family tradition preserved in the family of her mother, notwithstanding that the recently discovered line of descent, which they would have felt themselves honored to know, had been lost to memory.
When Samuel Russell (afterwards to become for-many-years pastor of the Congregational Church in Branford, Connecticut), was a boy nine or ten years old, there came a sense of mystery into his young life. It was a something new, and to his limited experience implied a threat of unknown terrors. It was in 1664 or 1665 and that was a time when fears of many sorts were rife, and fears of the unknown were particularly so. Ghosts and witchcraft were forbidden topics in his parents' household, yet many a forbidden subject has been talked of under the rose, both before and since, and few, even fewer than now, were then the children of the best-regulated households who had not heard back-chilling and hair-raising stories of ghostly visions and wicked incantations from the servants, with whom, on account of the many and onerous occupations of the parents, the children were necessarily associated for more hours daily than their mothers would have desired.
Tales of Indian outrages were an ever present topic in every household in those days, preceding the Great Swamp Fight, when a spirit of deep resentment was urging the savage tribes to attempt the utter annihilation of the whites before it should have become too late to make the attempt.
Because Indian plots were a subject of every day conversation, little Sammy felt quite sure that the Mystery, — the Mystery which he knew surrounded him, but could not guess — did not concern the savages. Once if ventured to ask his mother if she did not think their house might be haunted. At first she only laughed, then she tried to quiet his apprehensions by assuring him that ghosts only came to haunt places where crimes had been committed, and that none had been committed in their house, for no one had ever lived in it save themselves. But the youngster was not satisfied. He knew that he had not been dreaming where he had heard voices in the night that seemed to come from the sacred spare-room that no one was ever seen to enter or to leave. Though there was no communication between his room and this, and there was a separating closet that opened into his own little room, he had heard, he knew that he had heard the voiced of persons talking behind the partition at times when righteous folk were supposed to be asleep.
He had gone into that closet one night after ten o'clock, an hour that should have found him sound asleep, and would have, had he not remembered, with a start, that he had
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