Polly is more rash than I am, as the reader has observed in the outset of this memoir.  She risked Dennis one night under the eyes of her own sex.  Governor Gorges had always been very kind to us, and, when he gave his great annual party to the town, asked us.  I confess I hated to go.  I was deep in the new volume of Pfeiffer’s “Mystics,” which Haliburton had just sent me from Boston.  “But how rude,” said Polly, “not to return the Governor’s civility and Mrs. Gorges’s, when they will be sure to ask why you are away!” Still I demurred, and at last she, with the wit of Eve and of Semiramis conjoined, let me off by saying that, if I would go in with her, and sustain the initial conversations with the Governor and the ladies staying there, she would risk Dennis for the rest of the evening.  And that was just what we did.  She took Dennis in training all that afternoon, instructed him in fashionable conversation, cautioned him against the temptations of the supper-table,—­and at nine in the evening he drove us all down in the carryall.  I made the grand star-entree with Polly and the pretty Walton girls, who were staying with us.  We had put Dennis into a great rough top-coat, without his glasses:  and the girls never dreamed, in the darkness, of looking at him.  He sat in the carriage, at the door, while we entered.  I did the agreeable to Mrs. Gorges, was introduced to her niece, Miss Fernanda; I complimented Judge Jeffries on his decision in the great case of D’Aulnay vs. Laconia Mining Company; I stepped into the dressing-room for a moment, stepped out for another, walked home after a nod with Dennis and tying the horse to a pump; and while I walked home, Mr. Frederic Ingham, my double, stepped in through the library into the Gorges’s grand saloon.

Oh!  Polly died of laughing as she told me of it at midnight!  And even here, where I have to teach my hands to hew the beech for stakes to fence our cave, she dies of laughing as she recalls it,—­and says that single occasion was worth all we have paid for it.  Gallant Eve that she is!  She joined Dennis at the library-door, and in an instant presented him to Dr. Ochterlony, from Baltimore, who was on a visit in town, and was talking with her as Dennis came in.  “Mr. Ingham would like to hear what you were telling us about your success among the German population.”  And Dennis bowed and said, in spite of a scowl from Polly, “I’m very glad you liked it.”  But Dr. Ochterlony did not observe, and plunged into the tide of explanation; Dennis listened like a prime-minister, and bowing like a mandarin, which is, I suppose, the same thing.  Polly declared it was just like Haliburton’s Latin conversation with the Hungarian minister, of which he is very fond of telling. “Quaene sit historia Reformationis in Ungaria?” quoth Haliburton, after some thought.  And his confrere replied gallantly, “In seculo decimo tertio,” etc., etc., etc.; and from decimo tertio[P] to the nineteenth century and a half lasted till the oysters came.  So was it that before Dr. Ochterlony came to the “success,” or near it, Governor Gorges came to Dennis, and asked him to hand Mrs. Jeffries down to supper, a request which he heard with great joy.