icious
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.
Poor little Patty began to cry. Where could she be? She reached out
her hand, and climbed the huge beams that encased the bell, and tried
to touch the tongue. She wanted to hear it ring again, but could not
reach it.
"It's curious, curious," she sobbed, wiping her eyes and turning them
with a thrill of delight upon a beloved name that greeted her vision.
It was growing dark, and she _might_ be wrong. But no, it was the
dear name of Adams; and she saw, in a basket, a little pile of baby
raiment. There we
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