ere General Knox--"that stalwart man, two officers
in size and three in lungs"--was wont to order his dinner, and in a
stentorian voice compliment Master Stavers on the excellence of his
larder. One day--it was at the time of the French Revolution--Louis
Philippe and his two brothers applied at the door of the William Pitt
for lodgings; but the tavern was full, and the future king, with his
companions, found comfortable quarters under the hospitable roof of
Governor Langdon in Pleasant Street.

A record of the scenes, tragic and humorous, that have been enacted
within this old yellow house on the corner would fill a volume. A vivid
picture of the social and public life of the old time might be painted
by a skillful hand, using the two Earl of Halifax inns for a background.
The painter would find gay and sombre pigments ready mixed for his
palette, and a hundred romantic incidents waiting for his canvas. One
of these romantic episodes has been turned to very pretty account
by Longfellow in the last series of The Tales of a Wayside Inn--the
marriage of Governor Benning Wentworth with Martha Hilton, a sort of
second edition of King Cophetua and the Beggar Maid.

Martha Hilton was a poor girl, whose bare feet and ankles and scant
drapery when she was a child, and even after she was well in the bloom
of her teens, used to scandalize good Dame Stavers, the innkeeper's
wife. Standing one afternoon in the doorway of the Earl of Halifax, (1.
The first of the two hotels bearing that title. Mr. Brewster commits
a slight anachronism in locating the scene of this incident in Jaffrey
Street, now Court. The Stavers House was not built until the year of
Governor Benning Wentworth's death. Mr. Longfellow, in the poem, does
not fall into the same error.

"One hundred years ago, and something more,
In Queen Street, Portsmouth, at her tavern door,
Neat as a pin, and blooming as a rose,
Stood Mistress Stavers in her furbelows.")

Dame Stavers took occasion to remonstrate with the sleek-limbed and
lightly draped Martha, who chanced to be passing the tavern, carrying a
pail of water, in which, as the poet neatly says, "the shifting sunbeam
danced."

"You Pat! you Pat!" cried Mrs. Stavers severely; "why do you go looking
so? You should be ashamed to be seen in the street."

"Never mind how I look," says Miss Martha, with a merry laugh, letting
slip a saucy brown shoulder out of her dress; "I shall ride in my
chariot