The old furniture standing about was richly carved, and covered with faded green damask. In the billiard-room was an ancient spinet, quite as much out of tune as out of date. Doubtless, the flashing of white hands across those same yellow keys has often struck an answering chord in the breasts of colonial youth. Here are more portraits; and a buffet, a sideboard, and a sedan-chair. Punch has flowed, and laughter echoed here. The reader knows the pretty story, so gracefully told by Mr. Longfellow, of Martha Hilton, who became the second wife of Governor Benning,[130] and thus Lady Wentworth of the Hall. We can see her as she goes along the street, swinging the pail, a trifle heavy for her, and splashing with the water her naked feet. We hear her ringing laughter, and the saucy answer to Mistress Stavers in her furbelows, as that buxom landlady flings at her, in passing, the sharp reproof: "O Martha Hilton! Fie! how dare you go About the town half-dressed and looking so?" The poet's tale is at once a history and a picture, full of pretty conceits and picturesque situations. Fancy the battered effigy of the Earl of Halifax on the innkeeper's sign falling at the feet of Mrs. Stavers to declare his passion. [Illustration: GOVERNOR BENNING WENTWORTH.] But Benning Wentworth, governor though he was, was none too good for Martha Hilton.[131] It was the pride of the Hiltons made her say, "I yet shall ride in my own chariot." The widowed governor was gouty, passionate, and had imbibed with his long residence in Spain the hauteur of the Spaniard. He left office in 1766 in disgrace. The last of the colonial Wentworths was Sir John, in whose favor his uncle had been allowed to screen himself by a resignation. There are some odd coincidences in the family records of both uncle and nephew. The former's widow made a second marriage to a Wentworth; the latter married his widowed cousin, Frances Wentworth.[132] The mansion of Sir John may be seen in Pleasant Street, Portsmouth. He was the last royal governor of New Hampshire. John Adams mentions that as he was leaving his box at the theatre one night in Paris, a gentleman seized him by the hand: "'Governor Wentworth, sir,' said the gentleman. At first I was embarrassed, and knew not how to behave toward him. As my classmate and friend at college, and ever since, I could have pressed him to my bosom with most cordial affection. But we now belonged to two different nations, at war with each other, and consequently were enemies." The king afterward gave Sir John the government of Nova Scotia. The poet Moore mentions the baronet's kind treatment of him in 1805, during his American tour. He is said to have kept sixteen horses in his stable at Portsmouth, and to have been a free-liver. A man of unquestioned ability to govern, who went down under the great revolutionary wave of 1775, but rose again to the surface and struck boldly out.