“Indeed, they would soon begin to think I meant to marry you, Richard,” says she at supper one Sunday before a tableful, and laughed with the rest.

“They do not credit you with such good sense, my dear,” says her mother, smiling kindly at me.

And Dolly bit her lip, and did not join in that part of the merriment.

I fled to Patty Swain for counsel, nor was it the first time in my life I had done so.  Some good women seem to have been put into this selfish world to comfort and advise.  After Prince George Street with its gilt and marbles and stately hedged gardens, the low-beamed, vine-covered house in the Duke of Gloucester Street was a home and a rest.  In my eyes there was not its equal in Annapolis for beauty within and without.  Mr. Swain had bought the dwelling from an aged man with a history, dead some nine years back.  Its furniture, for the most part, was of the Restoration, of simple and massive oak blackened by age, which I ever fancied better than the Frenchy baubles of tables and chairs with spindle legs, and cabinets of glass and gold lacquer which were then making their way into the fine mansions of our town.  The house was full of twists and turns, and steps up and down, and nooks and passages and queer hiding-places which we children knew, and in parts queer leaded windows of bulging glass set high in the wall, and older than the reign of Hanover.  Here was the shrine of cleanliness, whose high-priestess was Patty herself.  Her floors were like satin-wood, and her brasses lights in themselves.  She had come honestly enough by her gifts, her father having married the daughter of an able townsman of Salem, in the Massachusetts colony, when he had gone north after his first great success in court.  Now the poor lady sat in a padded armchair from morning to night, beside the hearth in winter, and under the trees in summer, by reason of a fall she had had.  There she knitted all the day long.  Her placid face and quiet way come before me as I write.

My friendship with Patty had begun early.  One autumn day when I was a little lad of eight or nine, my grandfather and I were driving back from Whitehall in the big coach, when we spied a little maid of six by the Severn’s bank, with her apron full of chestnuts.  She was trudging bravely through the dead leaves toward the town.  Mr. Carvel pulled the cord to stop, and asked her name.  “Patty Swain, and it please your honour,” the child answered, without fear.  “So you are the young barrister’s daughter?” says he, smiling at something I did not understand.  She nodded.  “And how is it you are so far from home, and alone, my little one?” asked Mr. Carvel again.  For some time he could get nothing out of her; but at length she explained, with much coaxing, that her big brother Tom had deserted her.  My grandfather wished that Tom were his brother, that he might be punished as he deserved.  He commanded young Harvey to lift the child into the coach, chestnuts