For a full decade she rolled along, behind outriders, through the fair provincial roads, with kerchiefed children bobbing respectfully at every corner. The strange, stout, splenetic being to whom she owed her meridian glory, disgusted with events, and out of office, was gathered presently to his fathers, and left all his property in her hands. With instant despatch, the scene shifts. The Reverend Arthur Brown beholds the siren of Hilton blood again before him, with an imported Wentworth by her side: one red-coated Michael of England, who had been in the tragic smoke of Culloden. For three years now, in shady Portsmouth, he has been striding magnificently up and down, and fiddling at Stoodley’s far into the morning, for pure disinterested enthusiasm that the dancing might not flag; a live soldierly man, full of bluster and laughter, equal to many punches, and to afternoon gallops between the hills of Boston and his own fireside! The fortunate widow of one Georgian grandee became the wife of this other, his namesake; and save that Colonel Michael Wentworth was a much more suave and flexible person, besides being the “great buck” of his day, there was small divergence in him from the type of his predecessor. Men of that generation fell into a monotony: if they were rural, they were given to hunting, bousing, and swearing; the trail of Squire Western is over them all. Well did Martha, tamer of lions, know her _métier_. [Illustration: “The great buck of his day.”] Unto this twain gloriously reigning, came Washington, in 1789, rowed by white-jacketed sailors to their vine-hung, hospitable door. They were the mighty in the land; they had somehow weathered the Revolution; they were peers of— “The Pepperells, the Langdons, and the Lears, The Sparhawks, the Penhallows, and the rest,” with their stately Devon names; and none could more fitly honor the Father of the Country. He went about the town, indeed, in a visible halo, weaving the web of peace; and his smile was called as good as sunshine, and his Sunday black velvet small-clothes elegant in the extreme. There was a younger Martha in the house, curtseying to this kind guest, who had grown up to play the spinet by the open window in lilac-time, and who, later, tautologically bestowed her hand on a Wentworth, and passed with him to France. Her father’s cherry cheeks paled gradually, before he gave up his high living, and took to a bankrupt’s grave, in New York, in 1795. It was feared that he checkmated too hard a fate by suicide. “I have eaten my cake,” he said at the end, with a homely brevity. What was in his mind, no chronicler knoweth; but it is not unlawful to remember that in that eaten cake Martha Hilton was a plum. [Illustration: Fiddling at Stoodley’s far into the morning] [Illustration: Wharves now rotting along the harbor-borders]