ing on there."

"O Joe, stay, won't you?" she urged, but the lad was gone, and she
was left alone to meet the foe, comforting herself with the thought,
"They'll treat me with more respect if I LOOK respectable, and if I must
die, I'll die good-looking in my best clothes, anyhow."

She threw a few sticks of hickory-wood on the embers, and then drew
out the little round stand, on which the family Bible was always lying.
Recollecting that the British soldiers probably belonged to the Church
of England, she hurried away to fetch Uncle John's "prayer-book."

"They'll have respect to me, if they find me reading that, I know,"
she thought. Having drawn the round stand within sight of the well, and
where she could also command a view of the staircase, she sat and waited
for coming events.

Uncle John was keeping watch of the advancing troops from an upper
window. "Martha," he called, "you'd better come up. They're close by,
now." To tell the truth, Uncle John himself was a little afraid; that
is to say he hadn't quite courage enough to go down, and, perhaps,
encounter his own rheumatism and the king's soldiers on the same
stairway, and yet, he felt that he must defend Martha as well as he
could.

The rap of a musket, quick and ringing on the front door, startled the
little woman from her apparent devotions. She did not move at the call
of anything so profane. It was the custom of the time to have the front
door divided into two parts, the lower half and the upper half. The
former was closed and made fast, the upper could be swung open at will.

The soldier getting no reply, and doubtless thinking that the house was
deserted, leaped over the chained lower half of the door.

At the clang of his bayonet against the brass trimmings, Martha Moulton
groaned in spirit, for, if there was any one thing that she deemed
essential to her comfort in this life, it was to keep spotless,
speckless and in every way unharmed, the great knocker on her front
door.

"Good, sound English metal, too," she thought, "that an English soldier
ought to know how to respect."

As she heard the tramp of coming feet she only bent the closer over the
Book of Prayer that lay open on her knee. Not one word did she read or
see; she was inwardly trembling and outwardly watching the well and the
staircase. But now, above all other sounds, broke the noise of Uncle
John's staff thrashing the upper step of the staircase, and the shrill
tremulous cry of the