CHAPTER XVII.

BEWITCHED.

IN his tidy little house in New Amsterdam, Adam sat reading a letter from Governor William Phipps, written at Boston.

“I forgyve you y^r merrie empersonashun and all ye other things alsoe, save y^e going away without goode-bye,” he read, “but let it pass. I w^d write to say God Blesse you bothe. And as I have never known such a goode blade as y^{rs} in fight, I w^d offer you to make you my commander of ye forces to goe in war against ye French, where they do threat to harasse our peeple as of yore——”

Adam halted here and looked up at the battered old sword on the wall. His thought went truant, to his helpmate, away for a few minutes’ walk to Goody Dune’s. He shook his head at the Governor’s generous offer.

“Well, well, William,” he said aloud, “I don’t know. I don’t know what may be the matter, but—no more fighting for me, old comrade. I think it must be that I—am bewitched.”

THE END.

● Transcriber’s Notes: ○ Missing or obscured punctuation was silently corrected. ○ Typographical errors were silently corrected. ○ Inconsistent spelling and hyphenation were made consistent only when a predominant form was found in this book. ○ Text that: was in italics is enclosed by underscores (_italics_). ○ The use of a caret (^) before a letter, or letters, shows that the following letter or letters was intended to be a superscript, as in S^t Bartholomew or 10^{th} Century.