“The first fault belonged with this tavern of an Indian Queen. I could have been no older than eight when I knew how folk who came here, Congressmen and officers of state and their ladies, looked upon us who kept the place as but servants over servants, and took care not to meet us on an equal footing with themselves. My father and mother were disrated as mere tavern-keepers who sold their entertainment to any and to all; and I, so soon as I came to discretion and an ability to apprehend, found myself included in the ban thus set upon my people. I've seen nurses skurry to carry their charges off from childish games with me and the contamination of my baby contact. Later, in girlhood, I've overheard mothers while they warned their daughters to avoid me, and experienced the tilt-nosed airs of those same daughters who with superior arts of insolence stung me like wasps. More often than once, I've crept away to tears of shame because I was the daughter of a tavern. “But in the end it hardened me. I had a perverse, retaliatory temper. I grew up beautiful, so folk told me; moreover, I knew it but too well by the merest glance in a glass. With my beauty,”--Peg spoke of it in mixed simplicity and sadness as though she recounted deformity--“I was wont to fashion my revenge. My father--not a poor man, for while taverns may be vulgar they maybe profitable--was ever ready to spend money on me; and I had only to hint at a comb or a ribbon or a ring, to find the gewgaw an hour after on my table. Good, poor man! my father, calm and careless enough under his condition so far as it rested on himself, felt for my humiliations, which now and again he could not fail to see, and sought with trinketry and luxury of dress to repair the injury. Neither he nor my mother spoke of what they both must have felt, that is our nosocial condition, if one may so describe it; and for myself, I was too proud, and too tenderly in love with them for their thousand kindnesses, to bring it upon their notice. “As I've said, I made my beauty the method of my revenge. I owned taste as well as looks, and my wits were as deep and as quick and as bright as my eyes. I've set many a wrinkle on many a fair brow by defeating it to second place in that woman's rivalry of looks.