“Strange happenings have come to your cousin Tabitha Wells in Philadelphia since she said goodbye to you, John. I feel as if I, a little girl of only ten summers, and not as learned as I should be, were of a part with these great and stirring times in the Colonies.
“To wit, as the barristers say. And now, my dear John, I will tell my story.
“I mind that we played so much at home when you visited me, John, that I had no time to take you to the little upholstery shop on Arch Street, near grandmother’s house, which is my special delight.
“It is kept by one Mistress Betsy Ross, not much more than a grown-up girl. They say she is little past twenty in years, and she has a great pleasure in letting me visit and watch her at work. Her husband was a brave young patriot of our Colonies and was but a brief space since killed. Mrs. Betsy always helped him in his shop and now that he will be there no longer, and she being most skillful with her needle, she is carrying on the work of the shop herself.
“When I have finished wiping the dinner service for grandmother, I often ask leave to go down for the rest of the afternoon to the shop of Mistress Betsy. I mind that we are both of us lonely; I, the only child in so quiet a house as this in which my father left me when he joined the army; and she a slim, sweet lady, all alone in her shop.
“Such pretty stuffs as she has, John! If you were a girl your eyes would stick out for envy, and your fingers ache for scissors and needle. She gave me a bit of yellow satin brocade, picked out with a pattern of butterflies. I made a court dress of it for my wooden doll—although grandmother says such finery is not for a doll even in these days.
“But here I am letting my quill go wandering again, John. It is not of my doll that I am minded to write you, but of the important thing that happened in the shop of Mistress Betsy Ross this summer time. I was there, John. I saw it with my own eyes.
“Mistress Betsy was fitting new covers to grandmother’s best fiddle-backed chairs, and I had come down to her shop to see if they were done. It chanced that they were, but I lingered a while for Mistress Betsy was busying herself at what she likes best to do. She was stitching a flag.
“You know, of course, John, that each of our American Colonies has its own flag, each of a different design, although they all favor the same colors, red, and white, and blue. Such days as these, when troops are marching to war, there is need of many flags, and so Mistress Betsy is as busy stitching them as she is in making her furniture covers. So quick and deft, she is, John.
“I wish you could but see how neatly she sews together the colors, and stitches on the designs. No scrap of cloth is wasted, and each flag that Mistress Betsy makes is quite perfect in shape and pattern. I mind that the packet had just brought Mistress Betsy some bundles of fresh stuff for her flag-making, red and blue, and she was looking it over as she spoke to me: