For more than fifty years Betsy Ross continued to make government flags, with her daughters and nieces, and later her grandchildren, helping her. She continued to sew red and white stripes together and put five-pointed stars on the blue canton, even after her second marriage to a sea captain, while he went back and forth to Europe on his dangerous business, and during his imprisonment in England, where he died. When his friend, who had been a fellow-prisoner, was finally released and returned to Philadelphia to deliver to Betsy Ross her husband’s little property, she married this messenger and kept on making flags. Except for a brief residence with her daughter, she continued to live in the quaint little house on Arch Street where the flag was born. Shortly before her death she became completely blind; but her busy fingers must keep on stitching, and with her little grandsons to sort the colors for her, she sewed happily on carpet rags. When Mistress Ross retired from the business of making flags her daughter Clarissa took over this work and carried it on until 1857. Flags of many kinds they made--for army and navy, for arsenals and the merchant marine; flags with thirteen stars in a circle, like a round-robin to show that one state should have no precedence over the others; flags with stars in parallel rows of four, five and four; flags with fifteen stripes and stars; flags bearing the arms of Pennsylvania, painted on the silk by William Barrett. It was George Washington, more than any other, who seems to have been most interested in the question of a national flag. But it was to the skilled needlewoman that he took his first rough design, to have her opinion of its worth. It is to Betsy Ross that much of the beauty of our flag is due. A true patriot of Revolutionary times, her humble life is an incentive to others, showing that there is more than one way to serve the nation--even if one is known only as a maker of ruffles. CHAPTER IV MARY LINDLEY MURRAY 1720-1782 Except for one day’s events the story of Mrs. Murray is quickly told. A famous Quaker belle in Philadelphia was the beautiful Mary Lindley. After her marriage to Robert Murray, a merchant, she lived near Lancaster, Pennsylvania, and in North Carolina, until in 1753 they moved to New York City, where Murray and Sansom soon became one of the great merchandising firms of the time. There were a dozen children in the Murray household, one son being Lindley Murray, the grammarian. Hoping the milder climate would benefit her husband’s health, Mrs. Murray took her family to England where they lived for eleven years, returning to America during the first year of the Revolution.