stairs, wringing her
hands as she went and crying out:

"Oh, dear! what shall I do? The house will burn and the box up garret.
Everything's lost!"

Major Pitcairn, at that moment, was on the green in front of her door,
giving orders.

Forgetting the dignified part she intended to play, forgetting
everything but the supreme danger that was hovering in mid-air over her
home--the old house wherein she had been born, and the only home she
had ever known--she rushed out upon the green, amid the troops, and
surrounded by cavalry, and made her way to Major Pitcairn.

"The town-house is on fire!" she cried, laying her hand upon the
commander's arm.

He turned and looked at her. Major Pitcairn had recently learned that
the task he had been set to do in the provincial towns that day was
not an easy one; that, when hard pressed and trodden down, the despised
rustics, in home-spun dress, could sting even English soldiers; and
thus it happened that, when he felt the touch of Mother Moulton's plump
little old fingers on his military sleeve, he was not in the pleasant
humor that he had been, when the same hand had ministered to his hunger
in the early morning.

"Well, what of it? LET IT BURN! We won't hurt you, if you go in the
house and stay there!"

She turned and glanced up at the court-house. Already flames were
issuing from it. "Go in the house and let it burn, INDEED!" thought she.
"He knows me, don't he? Oh, sir! for the love of Heaven won't you stop
it?" she said, entreatingly.

"Run in the house, good mother. That is a wise woman," he advised.

Down in her heart, and as the very outcome of lip and brain she
wanted to say, "You needn't 'mother' me, you murderous rascal!" but,
remembering everything that was at stake, she crushed her wrath and
buttoned it in as closely as she had Uncle John behind the door in the
morning, and again, with swift gentleness, laid her hand on his arm.

He turned and looked at her. Vexed at her persistence, and extremely
annoyed at intelligence that had just reached him from the North Bridge,
he said, imperiously, "Get away! or you'll be trodden down by the
horses!"

"I CAN'T go!" she cried, clasping his arm, and fairly clinging to it in
her frenzy of excitement. "Oh stop the fire, quick, quick! or my house
will burn!"

"I have no time to put out your fires," he said, carelessly, shaking
loose from her hold and turning to meet a messenger with news.

Poor little woman! What could