Her comment had greater vivacity, and was pleasingly metrical. “You Pat, you Pat, how dare you go looking like that?” There seems to be no doubt that the pseudo-Hibernian did reply with a prophecy, and, better yet, that she made it her business to have spoken true. Seven years, according to the verses in question, did Martha serve her future lord; and it is not for this oracle, on whatever computation, to dispute with a son of Apollo. There she shed her clever childhood, and took her degree in the arts of womankind; busy with pans and clothes-lines, the sea-wind always in her hair, her strategic eye upon master’s deciduous charms, and perhaps, provisionally, upon master’s only son, “a flower too early faded” for any mortal plucking. The latter was not fore-doomed, either, to be a stepson. He died; and in March of 1760, one year after, a moment of historic astonishment befell the Reverend Arthur Brown, shared by the painted Strafford on the wall, when the good rector of St. John’s, having dined sumptuously at Little Harbor, heard his host proclaim:— “This is my birthday; it shall likewise be My wedding-day, and you shall marry me!” [Illustration: Wentworth house at Little Harbour] (Ah, no; he marrified him, did that Reverend Arthur Brown from the north of Ireland, who had so much to do, first and last, with the matrimonial oddities of the Wentworths.) And the victress, as all the world knows, was “You Pat,” suddenly found standing in the fine old council-chamber, appropriately vested, and radiant with her twenty years. Abruptly were they joined, these wondrous two, and literally “across the walnuts and the wine.” And now Martha had her chariot, as foretold, and her red heels, and her sweeping brocades, and a cushion towering on her powdered head, and a famous beautiful carven mantel, on which to lean her indolent elbow. By able and easy generalship is she here, with him of a race of rulers, aged sixty-five and terrible in his wrath, for her gentle orderly, her minion. The rustling of Love’s wings is not audible in the Governor’s corridors, perhaps would be an impertinence there, like any blow-fly’s; but domestic comfort was secured upon one side, and power, swaggering power, upon the other,—a heady draught of it, such as might well turn a novice giddy. Tradition saith that very shortly after her elevation, Martha dropped her ring, and summoned one of her recent colleagues to rescue it from the floor. But the colleague, alas! became piteously short-sighted, and could offer no help worth having, until my lady, with great acumen, dismissed her, and picked it up. [Illustration: and her strategic eye upon master’s deciduous charms”]