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” I never heard of such things. I don’t think it is proper to speak of them, or the Adamses would have told me. No more intelligent folks in the land than the Adamses, and I guess they know what belongs to good society and polite conversation. I declare I blushed so in my sleep that I was quite ashamed. I’ll get up and look about now. I’m sure this isn’t any one of the houses where we visit, or folks wouldn’t talk so.”

Patty Rutter straightened her bonnet on her head, smoothed down her robe of silken drab, adjusted her kerchief, looked at her watch to learn how long she had been sleeping, and found, to her surprise, that it had run down. Right over her head hung two watches.

“Why, how thoughtful folks are in this house,” she exclaimed in a timid voice, reaching up and taking one of the two time-pieces in her hand. “Why, here’s a name; let me see.”

Reading slowly, she announced that the watch belonged to “Wil-liam Wil-liams–worn when he signed the Declaration of Independence.” “Ah!” she cried, with pathetic tone, “this watch is run down too, at four minutes after five. I remember! This William Williams was one of the fifty-six Fathers. I guess I must be in Lebanon–he lived there and his folks would have his watch of course. Here’s another,” taking down a watch and reading, “Colonel John Trumbull. Run down, too! and at twenty-three minutes after six. He was the son of Brother Jonathan, Governor of one of the Mothers, when the Nation was born. Yes, yes, I must be in Lebanon. Well, it’s a comfort, at least, to know that I’m in company the Adamses would approve of, though how I came here is a mystery.”

She hung the watches in place, stepped out of the glass room, in which she had slept, into a hall, and with a slight exclamation of delicious approval, stopped short before a number of chairs, and clasped her little fingers tightly together.

You must remember that Patty Rutter was a Friend, a Quaker, perhaps a descendant of William Penn, but then, in her baby days, having been transplanted to the rugged soil and outspoken ways of Massachusetts, she could not keep silence altogether, in view of that which greeted her vision.

She was in the very midst of old friends. Chairs in which she had sat in her young days stood about the grand hall. On the walls hung portraits of the ancestor kings of the nation born at Philadelphia in 1776.

In royal robes and with careless grace, lounged King George III., the nation’s grandfather, angry no longer at his thirteen daughters who strayed from home with the Sons of Liberty.

Her feet made haste and her eyes opened wider, as her swift hands seized relic after relic. She sat in chairs that Washington had rested in; she caught up camp-kettles used on every field where warriors of the Revolution had tarried; she patted softly La Fayette’s camp bedstead; and wondered at the taste that had put into the hall two old, time-worn, battered doors, but soon found out that they had gone through all the storm of balls that fell upon the Chew House during the battle of Germantown.

She read the wonderful prayer that once was prayed in Carpenter’s Hall, and about which every member of Congress wrote home to his wife.

On a small “stand,” encased in glass, she came upon a portrait of Washington, painted during the time he waited for powder at Cambridge. Patty Rutter had seen it often, with its halo of the General’s own hair about it. She turned from it, and beheld (why, yes, surely she had seen that, but not here; it was, why long ago, in her baby days in Philadelphia, that Mrs. Rutter had taken her up into a tower to see it), a bell–Liberty Bell, that rang above the heads of the Fathers when the Nation was born.