With the first gleam of light every eye was fixed upon the box which had contained the charter.  It was empty!  The charter was gone!

Just what Sir Edmund said on this occasion history has not recorded.  Those were days in which the most exalted persons dealt freely in oaths, and it is to be presumed that the infuriated governor-general used words that must have sadly shocked the pious ears of his Puritan auditors.

But the charter had vanished, and could not be sworn back into the box.  Where it had gone probably no one knew; certainly no one was willing to say.  The members looked at one another in blank astonishment.  The lookers-on manifested as blank an ignorance, though their faces beamed with delight.  It had disappeared as utterly as if it had sunk into the earth, and the oaths of Sir Edmund and his efforts to recover it proved alike in vain.

But the mystery of that night after-history has revealed, and the story can now be told.  In truth, some of those present in the hall knew far more than they cared to tell.  In the darkness a quick-moving person had made a lane through the throng to a neighboring window whose sash was thrown up.  Out of this he leaped to the ground below.  Here people were thickly gathered.

“Make way,” he said (or may have said, for his real words have not been preserved), “for Connecticut and liberty.  I have the charter.”

The cheers redoubled.  The crowd separated and let him through.  In a minute he had disappeared in the darkness beyond.

Sir Edmund meanwhile was storming like a fury in the hall; threatening the colony with the anger of the king; declaring that every man in the chamber should be searched; fairly raving in his disappointment.  Outside, the bold fugitive sped swiftly along the dark and quiet streets, ending his course at length in front of a noble and imposing oak-tree, which stood before the house of the Honorable Samuel Wyllys, one of the colonial magistrates.

This tree was hollow; the opening slender without, large within.  Deeply into this cavity the fugitive thrust his arm, pushing the precious packet as far as it would go, and covering it thickly with fine d[’e]bris at the bottom of the trunk.

[Illustration:  The charter oak, Hartford.]

“So much for Sir Edmund,” he said.  “Let him now rob Connecticut of the charter of its liberties, if he can.”

Tradition—­for it must be acknowledged that this story is traditional, though probably true in its main elements—­tells us that this daring individual was Captain Joseph Wadsworth, a bold and energetic militia-leader who was yet to play another prominent part in the drama of colonial life.

As for the Charter Oak, it long remained Hartford’s most venerated historical monument.  It became in time a huge tree, twenty-five feet in circumference near the roots.  The cavity in which the charter was hidden grew larger year by year, until it was wide enough within to contain a child, though the orifice leading to it gradually closed until it was hardly large enough to admit a hand.  This grand monument to liberty survived until 1856, when tempest in its boughs and decay in its trunk brought it in ruin to the earth.