The gallant Sir Harry was at this time (1742) collector of the port of Boston, a place to which he had been appointed shortly before, by virtue of his family's great influence at the court of George the Second. No more distinguished house than that of Frankland was indeed to be found in all England at this time. A lineal descendant of Oliver Cromwell, our hero was born in Bengal, May 10, 1716, during his father's residence abroad as governor of the East India Company's factory. The personal attractiveness of Frankland's whole family was marked. It is even said that a lady of this house was sought in marriage by Charles the Second, in spite of the fact that a Capulet-Montague feud must ever have existed between the line of Cromwell and that of Charles Stuart. Young Harry, too, was clever as well as handsome. The eldest of his father's seven sons, he was educated as befitted the heir to the title and to the family estate at Thirkleby and Mattersea. He knew the French and Latin languages well, and, what is more to the point, used his mother tongue with grace and elegance. Botany and landscape-gardening were his chief amusements, while with the great literature of the day he was as familiar as with the great men who made it. As early as 1738, when he was twenty-two, he had come into possession of an ample fortune, but when opportunity offered to go to America with Shirley, his friend, he accepted the opening with avidity. Both young men, therefore, entered the same year (1741) on their offices, the one as Collector of the Port, and the other as Governor of the Colony. And both represented socially the highest rank of that day in America. "A baronet," says Reverend Elias Nason, from whose admirable picture of Boston in Frankland's time all writers must draw for reliable data concerning our hero,--"a baronet was then approached with greatest deference; a coach and four, with an armorial bearing and liveried servants, was a munition against indignity; in those dignitaries who, in brocade vest, gold lace coat, broad ruffled sleeves, and small-clothes, who, with three-cornered hat and powdered wig, side-arms and silver shoe buckles, promenaded Queen Street and the Mall, spread themselves through the King's Chapel, or discussed the measures of the Pelhams, Walpole, and Pitt at the Rose and Crown, as much of aristocratic pride, as much of courtly consequence displayed itself as in the frequenters of Hyde Park or Regent Street." This, then, was the manner of man who, to transact some business connected with Marblehead's picturesque Fort Sewall, then just a-building, came riding down to the rock-bound coast on the day our story opens, and lost his heart at the Fountain Inn, where he had paused for a long draught of cooling ale.