orld 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 t