After Arthur, a daughter, Harriet Peters, went to live in the house; she was a widow, Donald Peters having gone into the army--about '62 or '63, I think--and died of typhus in Libby Prison. One would have thought the house held out very slender attractions for the remaining Gwynnes, by this time; but all the heirs were pretty well straitened in means, and Mrs. Peters probably welcomed any way of reducing expenses. No one, least of all the heirs themselves, ever seemed to know, or be able to explain what had become of the Gwynne fortune; but it is certain that ten years after the Governor's death it was almost entirely dissipated, except what was held in trust or otherwise secured. This included the house, which could not be sold, as I have been told; at any rate Mrs. Peters had it for her life rent-free. I dare say she had pleasant enough memories of old days when she was a child and played about the pillars with her brothers and Caroline; she had two children, two little boys of her own, and she liked the idea of bringing them up in what she called without the least notion of being affected, her ancestral home. All the Gwynnes loved their dreary inheritance; they had as great a fondness and reverence for their name as if everyone that ever bore it had lived and died in the odour of sanctity; and doubtless regarded the house with something akin to the sacred affection of the Israelites for the Temple. I remember Mrs. Peters when she lived there, a tall woman with the thin, aquiline features and red hair of the family, going about with her black skirts and solemn face. Being constantly treated by her friends as a broken-hearted heroine, the daughter of one departed patriot and widow of another, I believe the pose became not distasteful to her as years went on; I have heard her refer to herself in sounding and mournful phrase as "the last of the Gwynnes,"--whereas, Heavens knows there were enough Gwynnes to stock a colony! She must have meant that she was the last of the Governor's immediate descendants--and so she was, excepting Caroline.[2]