“I am a farmer, and was one in the old days.  It is true I did not have so many neighbors as people nowadays, and I went without things that farmers now have.  I didn’t have newfangled cultivators, reapers, or such things.  But then what a stout house I lived in, a big, square house, and its frame wasn’t made of pipe-stem sticks!  They were big, solid sticks of oak that I had, and you could see them sticking out of the corners and down from the ceiling.  What chimneys I had, and the bricks came all the way from England!  I had none of your box stoves, but a big fire in the chimney which you could see.  My wife, Polly, had no carpets on the floor, but she had rugs she made of rags.  And my darter, Jerusha, what a cook she was!  She made pies—­cooked ’em, I mean—­in a brick oven, and she stewed her chickens in pots hung on hooks from a swinging crane in the chimney.  And then I gave Jerusha a turn-spit, too, which she put before the fire, and I gave her a tin kitchen.  Polly had a spinning-wheel and Jerusha a hand-loom, and that is where our cloth came from.  I raised corn and grass and potatoes, and we had plenty of apples, and what fun we had at huskin’ parties and apple parings!  I took care of my horses, oxen, cows, and sheep, pigs, too, and had to kill my own critters and cure the hams we used.  In those days we had to do many things ourselves, such as dip our candles, and I made my eyes weak mending Jedidiah’s shoes in the evening, a candle near me, and the tall old family clock ticking in the corner.”

Miss Barry was charming in her antique dress, as every White Shield thought.  It came down from her great-great-grandmother, Sally Tilton, who was a famous belle in her day.  The dress was hooped and ruffled, “trailed,” also, in the old style.  Miss Barry’s hair was powdered, and she wore white satin shoes.  She represented the “Daughters of Liberty,” and told about Emily Geiger, the South Carolina young lady who undertook to carry a written message from General Greene to General Sumter, and when the British took her, she ate up her letter!  The enemy released her, not finding her message.  She went on and she did her errand, though, giving the message from memory, as General Greene, fearful of a capture, had told her the contents of the letter.  Then Miss Barry told about some girls in New York who gave a coat of molasses and flag-down to a young man disrespectful to Congress.  She gave an account of the young ladies in Virginia, Massachusetts, and elsewhere.

Will Somers appeared in the dress of a revolutionary soldier, carrying on his shoulder a musket that was a fire-lock, and slung at his side was a powder-horn, while in his tinder-box were flint and steel.  How many battles this old Continental had been in, what victories he had won, and what hardships he had endured!  He was not slow to tell of them all.

The entertainment was voted a great success.

“There, Charles Pitt,” declared Aunt Stanshy the next morning at the breakfast-table, “I like that style of a club ever so much.  It tells you something.”