"Sir John," she replied, "is not a whit concerned. We here at the Hall have laid down our arms; we are peaceably disposed; farm duties begin; a multitude of affairs preoccupy us; so let who will fight out this quarrel in Massachusetts Bay, so only that we have tranquillity and peace in County Tryon." I listened, amazed, to this school-girl chatter, marvelling that she herself believed such pitiable nonsense. Yet, that she did believe it I was assured, because in my Lady Johnson there was nothing false, no treachery or lies or cunning. Somebody sure had filled her immature mind with this jargon, which now she repeated to me. And in it I vaguely perceived the duplicity and ingenious manoeuvring of wills and minds more experienced than her own. But I said only that I hoped this county might escape the conflagration now roaring through all New England and burning very fiercely in Virginia and the Carolinas. Then, smiling, I made her a compliment on her hair, which her Irish maid was dressing very prettily, and laughed at her man's banyan which she so saucily wore in place of a levete. Only a young and pretty woman could presume to wear a flowered silk banyan at her toilet; but it mightily became Polly Johnson. "Claudia is here," she remarked with a kindly malice perfectly transparent. I took the news in excellent part, and played the hopeless swain for a while, to amuse her, and so cunningly, too, that presently the charming child felt bound to comfort me. "Claudia is a witch," says she, "and does vast damage to no purpose but that it feeds her vanity. And this I have said frequently to her very face, and shall continue until she chooses to refrain from such harmful coquetry, and seems inclined to a more serious consideration of life and duty." "Claudia serious!" I exclaimed. "When Claudia becomes pensive, beware of her!" "Claudia should marry early--as I did," said she. But her features grew graver as she said it, and I saw not in them that inner light which makes delicately radiant the face of happy wifehood. I thought, "God pity her," but I said gaily enough that retribution must one day seize Claudia's dimpled hand and place it in the grasp of some gentleman fitly fashioned to school her. We both laughed; then she being ready for her stays and gown, I retired to the library below, where, to my chagrin, who should be lounging but Hiakatoo, war chief of the Senecas, in all his ceremonial finery. Despite what dear Mary Jamison has written of him, nor doubting that pure soul's testimony, I knew Hiakatoo to be a savage beast and a very devil, the more to be suspected because of his terrible intelligence. With him was a Mr. Hare, sometime Lieutenant in the Mohawk Regiment, with whom I had a slight acquaintance. I knew him to be Tory to the bone, a deputy of Guy Johnson for Indian affairs, and a very shifty character though an able officer of county militia and a scout of no mean ability.