Myths and Legends of Our Own Land, vol 4 | Page 4

in the
morning he was gone, nor has he since shown himself in the flesh.
On the tenth anniversary of this event three fishermen were hurrying up
the bay, hoping to reach home before dark, for they dreaded that
uncanny light, but a fog came in and it was late before they reached the
wharf. As they were tying their boat a channel seemed to open through
the mist, and along that path from the deep came a ball of pallid flame
with the rush of a meteor. There was one of the men who cowered at
the bottom of the boat with ashen face and shaking limbs, and did not
watch the light, even though it shot above his head, played through the
rigging, and after a wide sweep went shoreward and settled on his
house. Next day one of his comrades called for him, but Tom Wright
was gone, gone, his wife said, before the day broke. Like Jack Welch's
disappearance, this departure was unexplained, and in time he was
given up for dead.

Twenty years had passed, when Wright's presumptive widow was
startled by the receipt of a letter in a weak, trembling hand, signed with
her husband's name. It was written on his death-bed, in a distant place,
and held a confession. Before their marriage, Jack Welch had been a
suitor for her hand, and had been the favored of the two. To remove his
rival and prosper in his place, Wright stole upon the other at his work,
killed him, took his body to sea, and threw it overboard. Since that time
the dead man had pursued him, and he was glad that the end of his days
was come. But, though Tom Wright is no more, his victim's light
comes yearly from the sea, above the spot where his body sank, floats
to the scene of the murder on the shore, then flits to the house where
the assassin lived and for years simulated the content that comes of
wedded life.

MOGG MEGONE
Hapless daughter of a renegade is Ruth Bonython. Her father is as
unfair to his friends as to his enemies, but to neither of them so
merciless as to Ruth. Although he knows that she loves Master
Scammon-- in spite of his desertion and would rather die than wed
another, he has promised her to Mogg Megone, the chief who rules the
Indians at the Saco mouth. He, blundering savage, fancies that he sees
to the bottom of her grief, and one day, while urging his suit, he opens
his blanket and shows the scalp of Scammon, to prove that he has
avenged her. She looks in horror, but when he flings the bloody trophy
at her feet she baptizes it with a forgiving tear. What villany may this
lead to? Ah, none for him, for Bonython now steps in and plies him
with flattery and drink, gaining from the chief, at last, his signature--the
bow totem--to a transfer of the land for which he is willing to sell his
daughter. Ruth, maddened at her father's meanness and the Indian's
brutality, rushes on the imbruted savage, grasps from his belt the knife
that has slain her lover, cleaves his heart in twain, and flies into the
wood, leaving Bonython stupid with amazement.
Father Rasles, in his chapel at Norridgewock, is affecting his Indian
converts against the Puritans, who settled to the southward of him fifty
years before. To him comes a woman with torn garments and
frightened face. Her dead mother stood before her last night, she says,
and looked at her reprovingly, for she had killed Mogg Megone. The

priest starts back in wrath, for Mogg was a hopeful agent of the faith,
and bids her go, for she can ask no pardon. Brooding within his chapel,
then, he is startled by the sound of shot and hum of arrows. Harmon
and Moulton are advancing with their men and crying, "Down with the
beast of Rome! Death to the Babylonish dog!" Ruth, knowing not what
this new misfortune may mean, runs from the church and disappears.
Some days later, old Baron Castine, going to Norridgewock to bury and
revenge the dead, finds a woman seated on the earth and gazing over a
field strewn with ashes and with human bones. He touches her. She is
cold. There has been no life for days. It is Ruth.

THE LADY URSULA
In 1690 a stately house stood in Kittery, Maine, a strongly guarded
place with moat and drawbridge (which was raised at night) and a
moated grange adjacent where were cattle, sheep, and horses. Here, in
lonely dignity, lived Lady Ursula, daughter of the lord of Grondale
Abbey, across the water, whose distant grandeurs were in some sort
reflected in this manor