It is with some hesitation that I offer to the public this story of Doctor LeBaron, including, as it does, so many other of the Old Colony chronicles; and this, for the trite old reason that truth is stranger than fiction, and therefore more incredible. It is these incredible truths, however, that give its color to the folk-lore of any given epoch, and every student of our country's early history has discovered that our forefathers lived quite as intensely, if not as scientifically, as we do. They had, to be sure, no railway accidents, steamboat explosions, or "tramp-wire" catastrophes, but they supped full of horrors in the way of witchcraft, cursing, demoniacal possession, murder, lawless love, and broken hearts; in fact, found in their own surroundings all that vital stimulus which we are apt to count as outgrowth of our advanced civilization.<br><br>The story of Mother Crewe's curse, with its results, is substantially true, and the scene depicted in chapter xliv. is literally so.<br><br>The tragedy embodied in chapter xxiv. is also matter of history, and its veracity must apologize for its horror.