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Dennis found work at the tavern. He would sit on the tavern steps to watch for the Governor in the evenings when the latter appeared on the green. He soon joined the good people in calling the Governor “Brother Jonathan.”

Dennis was superstitious—most Irishmen are—but he was hardly more given to ghostly fears than the Connecticut farmers were. Nearly every farmstead at that period had its ghost story. Good Governor Trumbull would hardly have given an hour to the fairy tale, but he probably would have listened intently to a graveyard or “witch” story.

People did not see angels then as in old Hebrew days, but thought that there were sheeted ghosts that came out of graveyards, or made night journeys through lonely woods, and stood at the head of garret stairs, “avenging” spirits that haunted those who had done them wrong.

So we only picture real life when we bring Dennis into this weird atmosphere, that made legs nimble, and cats run home when the clouds scudded over the moon.

Dennis had heard ghost story after ghost story on his journey and at the store. Almost everybody had at least one such story to tell; how that Moodus hills would shake and quake at times, and tip over milk-pans, and cause the maid to hide and the dog to howl; how the timbers brought together to build a church, one night set to capering and dancing; how a woman who had a disease that “unjinted her jints” (unjointed her joints) came all together again during a great “revival”; how witches took the form of birds, and were shot with silver bullets; and like fantastic things which might have filled volumes.