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.

While these things had been in the telling, Polly had slipped from the
table unnoticed, and had lighted every la