One fifteenth of June two children sat with bated breath in the pinnace, —­Dorothy Manners and myself.  Mistress Dolly was then as mischievous a little baggage as ever she proved afterwards.  She was coming to pass a week at the Hall, her parents, whose place was next to ours, having gone to Philadelphia on a visit.  We rounded Kent Island, which lay green and beautiful in the flashing waters, and at length caught sight of the old windmill, with its great arms majestically turning, and the cupola of Carvel House shining white among the trees; and of the upper spars of the shipping, with sails neatly furled, lying at the long wharves, where the English wares Mr. Carvel had commanded for the return trips were unloading.  Scarce was the pinnace brought into the wind before I had leaped ashore and greeted with a shout the Hall servants drawn up in a line on the green, grinning a welcome.  Dorothy and I scampered over the grass and into the cool, wide house, resting awhile on the easy sloping steps within, hand in hand.  And then away for that grand tour of inspection we had been so long planning together.  How well I recall that sunny afternoon, when the shadows of the great oaks were just beginning to lengthen.  Through the greenhouses we marched, monarchs of all we surveyed, old Porphery, the gardener, presenting Mistress Dolly with a crown of orange blossoms, for which she thanked him with a pretty courtesy her governess had taught her.  Were we not king and queen returned to our summer palace?  And Spot and Silver and Song and Knipe, the wolf-hound, were our train, though not as decorous as rigid etiquette demanded, since they were forever running after the butterflies.  On we went through the stiff, box-bordered walks of the garden, past the weather-beaten sundial and the spinning-house and the smoke-house to the stables.  Here old Harvey, who had taught me to ride Captain Daniel’s pony, is equerry, and young Harvey our personal attendant; old Harvey smiles as we go in and out of the stalls rubbing the noses of our trusted friends, and gives a gruff but kindly warning as to Cassandra’s heels.  He recalls my father at the same age.

Jonas Tree, the carpenter, sits sunning himself on his bench before the shop, but mysteriously disappears when he sees us, and returns presently with a little ship he has fashioned for me that winter, all complete with spars and sails, for Jonas was a shipwright on the Severn in the old country before he came as a king’s passenger to the new.  Dolly and I are off directly to the backwaters of the river, where the new boat is launched with due ceremony as the Conqueror, his Majesty’s latest ship-of-the-line.  Jonas himself trims her sails, and she sets off right gallantly across the shallows, heeling to the breeze for all the world like a real man-o’-war.  Then the King would fain cruise at once against the French, but Queen Dorothy must needs go with him.  His Majesty points out that when fighting is to be done, a ship of war is no place for a woman, whereat her Majesty stamps her little foot and throws her crown of orange blossoms from her, and starts off for the milk-house in high dudgeon, vowing she will play no more.