The second was also addressed to Sophonisba, who on the 3d of June was yet visiting friends in Salem. After a few details of domestic news, it went on:
"Doctor Haywood is missing: no one knows where he is gone. He has been looked for in Boston, but they have found no news of him; only that a little black boy says he saw a man like him go on board a ship bound for the East Indies. Now he is gone, they find he owes money to a great many besides your father. He owes to people in Boston for drugs and medicines--some, it is said, very costly, and sent for express to the old country. Mr. Sewell, the bookseller there, says he tried to dispose of his books to him; and when he did not buy them, thinks he sent them to the old country. He owes every one he could get to trust him. It is odd what he did with all the money. It is thought Jonathan Phelps will get the house. They went up to it and found the door unlocked. They found nothing in the house but the furniture, and that very common and cheap. There were none of all those things they said he had; only in the south room a lot of bottles and jars, and a brick place built up with a vent outside, which Parson H---- says is a furnace such as folks use that study chemistry. There was a great heap of ashes in the fireplace, as if he had burned papers or books there, and a great burned spot on the floor right before it."
"Who was the writer of these?" I asked as I refolded the little old letter, "and what became of Doctor Haywood? Was nothing more heard?"
In answer to these questions my friend gave the following narration.
The writer of the journal was my great uncle, Silas T----. Sophonisba and Faithful were my mother's cousins. Both were much older than she, but I have often seen Faithful when I was a girl, and I had all the story there is from herself. The little house on the hill fell into the hands of the chief creditor, who took down the furnace in the south room and offered the place to rent, but no tenant ever remained there long, either because of the bleak situation or the want of a garden. There were rumors that the place was not quite canny. One woman, indeed, went so far as to declare that she had seen the doctor's figure, dim and unsubstantial, standing before the fireplace in the twilight, and that once, as she came up the cellar stairs, something followed her and laid a cold hand on her shoulder; but as she was a nervous, hysterical person, and moreover was known to be somewhat given to exaggeration, no one paid much attention to her tale.
It was certain, however, that there was a great deal of sickness in the house. One family who rented the place lost three children by fever in one summer, and it was remarkable that all three seemed to fall under the same delusion, and insisted that something or some one, coming behind them, laid upon their shoulders a cold hand. One of them, toward the last, said that a shadow kept moving to and fro in the room, and kept the sunshine all away. The woman who had seen the vision of the old doctor became a widow the next month, and so much sickness and death took place in the house that at last no one would live there, and it was shut up by its owner.
In due course of time the father and mother of Sophonisba and Faithful were laid in Dorchester burial-ground. Mr. T---- had never been a rich man by any means, and when he died there was little left for the two girls, even after the sale of the homestead. They did not, however, consider themselves poor, but with their fifteen hundred dollars in the bank and their trade of milliner and dressmaker thought themselves very well to do in the world. Sophonisba, the elder, was at that time a little under fifty--an energetic, hard-working woman, with a constitution of wrought iron and bend leather, and no more under the influence of what are called "nerves" than if they had been left out of her system entirely. If ever a woman was born into this world an old maid, it was Sophonisba T----. Her fine name was the only romantic thing about her. She had had more than one offer of marriage in her day, but she had no talent for matrimony, and had turned such a very cold shoulder on her admirers that the swains became dispirited, and betook themselves to the courtship of more impressible damsels. There was no hidden romance or tale of unreturned affection in Miss Sophonisba's experience. The simple fact was, she had never wished to be married. Miss Faithful was five years her sister's junior. She had never found room in her heart for a second love since John Clark went down in the Federalist. She had been a young and pretty girl then, and now she was a thin, silent, rather nervous little body, depending entirely upon her sister with a helpless kind of affection that was returned on Miss Sophonisba's part by a devotion which might almost be called passionate.
"I tell you what it is, Faithful," said Miss Sophonisba one evening, as they sat over their tea, "if they raise the rent on us here, I won't stay."
The sisters had lived in the house ever since the death of their mother, five years before. Their business had prospered, and they were conveniently situated, but, for all that, Miss Sophonisba had no mind to pay additional rent.
"No?" said Faithful, inquiringly.