eem divine!"

she grew from childhood into the lovely woman whom Governor Wentworth
wooed and won.

In the March of 1760 it was that the host at Little Harbour exclaimed
abruptly to the good rector of St. John's, who had been dining
sumptuously at the manor-house:

"This is my birthday; it shall likewise be my wedding-day, and you shall
marry me!" No wonder the listening guests were greatly mystified, as
Martha and the portly governor were joined "across the walnuts and the
wine" by the Reverend Arthur Brown, of the Established Church.

And now, of course, Martha had her chariot, from which she could look
down as disdainfully as did the Earl of Halifax on the humble folk who
needs must walk. The sudden elevation seems, indeed, to have gone to my
lady's head. For tradition says that very shortly after her marriage
Martha dropped her ring and summoned one of her late kitchen colleagues
to rescue it from the floor. But the colleague had quickly become
shortsighted, and Martha, dismissing her hastily, picked up the circlet
herself.

Before the Reverend Arthur Brown was gathered to his fathers, he had
another opportunity to marry the fascinating Martha to another
Wentworth, a man of real soldierly distinction. Her second husband was
redcoated Michael, of England, who had been in the battle of Culloden.

This Colonel Michael Wentworth was the "great buck" of his day, and was
wont to fiddle at Stoodley's far into the morning for sheer love of
fiddling and revelry. Stoodley's has now fallen indeed! It is the brick
building marked "custom-house," and it stands at the corner of Daniel
and Penhallow Streets.

To this Lord and Lady Wentworth it was that Washington, in 1789, came as
a guest, "rowed by white-jacketed sailors straight to their vine-hung,
hospitable door." At this time there was a younger Martha in the house,
one who had grown up to play the spinet by the long, low windows, and
who later joined her fate to that of still another Wentworth, with whom
she passed to France.

A few years later, in 1795, the "great buck" of his time took to a
bankrupt's grave in New York, forgetting, so the story goes, the eternal
canon fixed against self-slaughter.

But for all we tell as a legend this story of Martha Hilton, and for all
her "capture" of the governor has come down to us almost as a myth, it
is less than fifty years ago that the daughter of the man who fiddled at
Stoodley's and of the girl who went barefooted and