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Polly disappeared. Before her father had considered the matter she had, assisted by her Aunt Melicent and Polly Lewis, seized from the pantry shelves all that they could carry, and going by a rear way, had hidden on the garret stairs a big roast of veal, one of lamb, and enough bread and pies for family requirements, and still the pantry shelves seemed amply filled. “I’m not going to have Ethel come home in the night and find nothing left for him I know, and the hungry boys fast asleep and tired out on the kitchen settle will come to life ravenous. Wonder if I hadn’t better be missing just now and go fetch the cows down. Father would have asthma all night if he tried it,” said Polly to her aunt; and up the hill Polly went accompanied by little Polly–while Mrs. Porter stood by and saw the fruits of her hard day’s work vanish out of sight.

“Pray leave something for your own household,” she ventured to intercede at last. “Don’t forget that we have four guests of our own for the night;” but Mr. Porter, rather proud to show that, however remiss others had been, the Porter Inn was prepared for emergencies, had already bidden Nancy and Phyllis fetch forth the last loaf.

“Like one for supper,” ventured Nancy, as her master carefully examined the empty larder, hoping to find something more. As the last captain from Northbury started on the night journey for New Haven, Mr. Porter faced his wife. “Now Thomas Porter,” she said, “you can go hungry to bed, but what can I do for my guests and the children and the rest of the household?”

Mr. Porter scratched his head–a habit when profoundly in doubt–and said: “I must fetch the cows! It’s most dark now,” and set forth, to find that Polly had them all safely in the cattle yard.

“I suppose, father,” said Polly, “that we’ve got to live on milk to-night. I thought so when I heard you parleying with the captains. So I thought I’d get the cows down.” As Polly entered the house, she saw a lady and two girls of about her own age, to whom her mother was saying: “We will give you shelter, gladly, but my husband has just let the militia you met just below have the last morsel of cooked food in our house, and we’ve nothing left for ourselves but milk for supper.”

“Mother,” said Polly, stepping to the front; “we have plenty! I looked out for you before father got to the pantry. I made journeys to the garret stairs, several of them, and Aunt Melicent and Polly Lewis helped me. It is all right for the lady to stay.”

The lady in question was Mrs. Thankful Punderson and her twin daughters, girls of twelve years, who had escaped from New Haven just as the British troops reached Broadway, and the riot and plunder and killing began. “I hoped,” she said, “to reach the house of my husband’s sister, Mrs. Zachariah Thompson, in Westbury, but Anna and Thankful are too tired to walk further to-night, and the horse can carry but two. It is getting late, and I am so thankful to stay.”

As Mr. Porter stood on the porch looking down the road for the next arrival, hoping to learn some later news and perhaps to hear Ethel’s cheery call in the distance, Polly said: “Father, will you let me be innkeeper to-night?”

“Gladly, Polly, with nothing to keep and not a room to spare,” was his reply.

“Then I’ll invite you to supper, and mind, if the ministers themselves come, they can’t have a bite to-night, for I’m the keeper.”

“I suppose you’ve made us some hasty pudding while the milking was going on,” he said, as Polly, preceding her father for once, went before, and opened the door upon a table abundantly supplied, and laid for twelve.

At the table Mr. Porter told, for the benefit of Mrs. Melicent Porter and Mrs. Punderson, some of the events, both pathetic and tragic, that had occurred in the old house during his boyhood and youth, and Mrs. Melicent Porter told again the events of the day in June–only a year before–wherein the battle of Monmouth had been fought near her New Jersey home, and she had spent the day in doing what she could to relieve the sufferings of men so spent with battle and heat and wounds that they panted to her door with tongues hanging from their mouths; also of her perilous journey from New Jersey to Connecticut on horseback, accompanied by Lieutenant-Colonel Baldwin, her father–during which journey it was, that she had thrown her daughter Melicent in safety from her horse to the bank of the river they were fording, while the animal, having lost its footing, was going down the current.