The Only Woman in the Town, and Other Tales of the American Revolution — John Shaqi
The Only Woman in the Town, and Other Tales of the American RevolutionPrichard, Sarah J. (Sarah Johnson)
History
The Only Woman in the Town, and Other Tales of the American Revolution
Prichard, Sarah J. (Sarah Johnson)
Short stories; United States -- History -- Revolution, 1775-1783 -- Fiction
Reading slowly, she announced that the watch belonged to "Wil-liam
Wil-liams--worn when he signed the Declaration of Independence." "Ah!"
she cried, with pathetic tone, "this watch is run down _too_, at four
minutes after five. I remember! _This_ William Williams was one of the
fifty-six Fathers. I guess I must be in Lebanon--he lived there and
his folks would have his watch of course. Here's another," taking down
a watch and reading, "Colonel John Trumbull. _Run down, too!_ and at
twenty-three minutes after six. _He_ was the son of Brother Jonathan,
Governor of one of the Mothers, when the Nation was born. Yes, yes, I
must be in Lebanon. Well, it's a comfort, at least, to know that I'm
in company the Adamses would approve of, though _how_ I came here is a
mystery."
She hung the watches in place, stepped out of the glass room, in which
she had slept, into a hall, and with a slight exclamation of delicious
approval, stopped short before a number of chairs, and clasped her
little fingers tightly together.
You must remember that Patty Rutter was a Friend, a Quaker, perhaps a
descendant of William Penn, but then, in her baby days, having been
transplanted to the rugged soil and outspoken ways of Massachusetts,
she could not keep silence altogether, in view of that which greeted
her vision.
She was in the very midst of old friends. Chairs in which she had sat
in her young days stood about the grand hall. On the walls hung
portraits of the ancestor kings of the nation born at Philadelphia in
1776.
In royal robes and with careless grace, lounged King George III., the
nation's grandfather, angry no longer at his thirteen daughters who
strayed from home with the Sons of Liberty.
Her feet made haste and her eyes opened wider, as her swift hands
seized relic after relic. She sat in chairs that Washington had rested
in; she caught up camp-kettles used on every field where warriors of
the Revolution had tarried; she patted softly La Fayette's camp
bedstead; and wondered at the taste that had put into the hall two
old, time-worn, battered doors, but soon found out that they had gone
through all the storm of balls that fell upon the Chew House during
the battle of Germantown.
She read the wonderful prayer that once was prayed in Carpenter's
Hall, and about which every member of Congress wrote home to his
wife.
On a small "stand," encased in glass, she came upon a portrait of
Washington, painted during the time he waited for powder at Cambridge.
Patty Rutter had seen it often, with its halo of the General's own
hair about it. She turned from it, and beheld (why, yes, surely she
_had_ seen _that_, but not here; it was, why long ago, in her baby
days in Philadelphia, that Mrs. Rutter had taken her up into a tower
to see it), a bell--Liberty Bell, that rang above the heads of the
Fathers when the Nation was born.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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