"O Joe, stay, won't you?" she urged, but the lad was gone, and she was left alone to meet the foe, comforting herself with the thought, "They'll treat me with more respect if I _look_ respectable, and if I _must_ die, I'll die good-looking in my best clothes, anyhow." She threw a few sticks of hickory-wood on the embers and then drew out the little round stand, on which the family Bible was always lying. Recollecting that the British soldiers probably belonged to the Church of England, she hurried away to fetch Uncle John's "prayer book." "They'll have respect to me, if they find me reading that, I know," she thought. Having drawn the round stand within sight of the well, and where she could also command a view of the staircase, she sat and waited for coming events. Uncle John was keeping watch of the advancing troops from an upper window. "Martha," he called, "you'd better come up. They're close by, now." To tell the truth, Uncle John himself was a little afraid; that is to say, he hadn't quite courage enough to go down and, perhaps, encounter his own rheumatism and the king's soldiers on the same stairway, and yet, he felt that he must defend Martha as well as he could. The rap of a musket, quick and ringing, on the front door, startled the little woman from her apparent devotions. She did not move at the call of anything so profane. It was the custom of the time to have the front door divided into two parts, the lower half and the upper half. The former was closed and made fast, the upper could be swung open at will. The soldier getting no reply, and doubtless thinking that the house was deserted, leaped over the chained lower half of the door. At the clang of his bayonet against the brass trimmings, Martha Moulton groaned in spirit, for, if there was any one thing that she deemed essential to her comfort in this life, it was to keep spotless, speckless and in every way unharmed, the great knocker on her front door. "Good, sound English metal, too," she thought, "that an English soldier ought to know how to respect." As she heard the tramp of coming feet she only bent the closer over the Book of Prayer that lay open on her knee. Not one word did she read or see; she was inwardly trembling and outwardly watching the well and the staircase. But now, above all other sounds, broke the noise of Uncle John's staff thrashing the upper step of the staircase, and the shrill, tremulous cry of the old man, defiant, doing his utmost for the defense of his castle. The fingers that lay beneath the book tingled with desire to box the old man's ears, for the policy he was pursuing would be fatal to the treasure in garret and in well; but she was forced to silence and inactivity.