These wives brought refinement and education with them; so that, at last, could they have sunk the shop, the Waddys would have been admitted as gentlefolk anywhere. They enjoyed, too, the consciousness of being better in rank than their neighbours. They never spoke of Whitegift as the cook, but as the Steward, or sometimes the Purveyor, of the _Mayflower_. They liked to walk through Beacon Street and smile placidly at the efforts of new people to win position by great houses, crowded balls and routs, and promotion marriages. By-and-by it chanced that, quite contrary to rule, there were three sons in one generation playing in the puddles of Dullish Court and slyly filching dry gingerbread from the showcases of the old shop. It was a time when there was a flame in the land, and the elder twin of the three young Waddys, Whitegift by name, who had been early taken with tin soldiers and penny trumpets, awoke one morning after booziness to find himself, to his total surprise, with a red coat on his back and a king’s shilling in his pocket. There was so little real martial ardour in his soul that he at once withered away, and being sent to the garrison of New York as a recruit of doubtful loyalty, he was there soon invalided. He finally dropped into the family trade and became a sutler. The Boston Waddys, saddened by his desertion of a cause they had vigour enough to support, soon forgot his existence--which does not at all imply that such existence terminated. The other twin was apparently of the usual Waddy type; but when the great flame blazed forth at last unquenchable, he also took fire. He was a volunteer at Lexington and did active service, dropping several invaders in their bloody tracks. He was at once made sergeant in Captain Janeway’s company, and gained the respect of his officers by his quick, ready energy. Ira was his name--Ira Waddy, the First. Two months later, when the British were trying that uphill work at Bunker Hill for the third time, Captain Jane way and Sergeant Waddy waited rather too long. Three or four of the British rushed at Janeway with eyes staring for plunder. One of them stared at what he got and lay there staring, with his head down-hill. To bore this fellow had occupied Janeway’s sword, and though Sergeant Waddy’s clubbed musket could brain another assailant, it could not parry two bayonet thrusts. His breast could and did; so that Janeway felt nothing more than a scratch, when, with a murderous stamp of the left foot, another soldier ran the sergeant through. Just then a rush of flying Yankees came by and cleared the spot of foes. The captain had a moment to kneel by his preserver and hear him gasp some broken words: “Mother! Take care of them, captain. Oh, Mary, Mary!”