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.