Once Upon A Time In Connecticut | Page 5

with distinction in the army and had held responsible positions. He was also a man used to courts as well as to camps, for as a boy he had been a page in the king's household and later was attached to the king's service. He must have presented a contrast in appearance and manner to the Connecticut magistrates who so anxiously awaited his coming.
When he entered the room he took the governor's seat and ordered the king's commission to be read, which appointed him governor of all New England. He then declared the old government to be dissolved and asked that the charter under which it had been carried on should be given up to him. The Assembly was obliged to recognize his authority and to accept the new government; but a story of that famous meeting has been handed down in Connecticut from one generation to another telling how the people contrived to keep their charter, the document they loved because it guaranteed their freedom.
"The Assembly sat late that night," says the story, "and the debate was long." When Sir Edmund Andros asked for the charter it was brought in and laid on the table. Then Robert Treat, who had been Governor of Connecticut, rose and began a speech. He told of the great expense and hardship the people had endured in planting the colony, of the blood and treasure they had expended in defending it against "savages and foreigners," and said it was "like giving up life now, to surrender the patent and privileges so dearly bought and so long enjoyed." Suddenly, while he was speaking, all the candles went out. There was a moment of confusion; then some one brought a tinder-box and flint and the candles were relighted. The room was unchanged; the same number of people were there; but the table where the charter had lain was empty, for in that moment of darkness the charter had disappeared.
No one knew who had taken it. No one could find it. No one saw the candles blown out. Was it done on purpose, or did a door or a window fly open and a gust of the night wind put them out? It chanced that the night was Allhallowe'en, when the old tales say that the witches and fairies and imps are abroad and busy. Were any of them busy that night with Connecticut's charter?
"Two men in the room, John Talcott and Nathaniel Stanley, took the charter when the lights were out." So said Governor Roger Wolcott long afterward. He was a boy nine years old at the time and had often heard the story. But these two men never left the room; they were members of the Assembly; they could not carry off the charter. However, Major Talcott had a son-in-law, Joseph Wadsworth, and he was waiting outside,--so says another story. Wadsworth was young and daring. The charter was passed out to him and he hid it under his cloak and made his way swiftly through the crowd that had gathered around the tavern and through the dim, deserted streets beyond, to where an old oak tree grew in front of the Wyllys house. This tree had a hollow in its trunk and Wadsworth slipped the charter into this safe hiding-place and left it there. Houses might be searched, but no one would think of looking for a missing paper in the hidden heart of a hollow oak. And because the old tree proved a good guardian and gave shelter in a time of trouble to Connecticut's charter it was known and honored later as the Charter Oak.
[Illustration: WADSWORTH HIDING THE CHARTER From a bas-relief on the State Capitol, Hartford, Conn.]
We are not told what was said or done in the court chamber after the charter disappeared. The stories of that night are full of mystery and contradiction. Perhaps, after all, no very serious search was made for it. Perhaps its loss brought about a compromise between the two parties. For Governor Andros had already gained his object; he had taken over the government of Connecticut, and the people had saved their pride because they had not surrendered their charter.
The charter lay hidden for two years; not all that time in the oak tree, of course, but in some other safe place. One tradition says it was kept for a while in Guilford in the house of Andrew Leete. At the end of two years there was a revolution in England, and William and Mary came to the English throne. Then the charter was taken out of its hiding-place--wherever that was--and government was at once resumed under the same old patent which had disappeared so mysteriously on that famous Allhallowe'en night.
In the Memorial Hall of the State Library at Hartford, under a glass shield, in a