Lady Frankland returned to Hopkinton, and there she lived through uneventful days, with her sister and sister’s children, overseeing her spacious estate, and entertaining her hosts of friends, until 1775, that fiery date of American story. A jealous patriotism was rife; and it was not unnatural that the widow of an officer of the Crown, herself a devotee of the Established Church, should become an object of local suspicion, hand in glove as she was with the British invaders of our peace. Like many another avowed royalist, she judged it best to leave her undefended estate at Hopkinton, and place herself under military protection in Boston, and there she arrived, after a short detention by some over-zealous patriot, in time to witness the battle of Bunker Hill from the windows of her house, and to receive some of the wounded within its shelter. Thence she sailed for England, as our unpleasantness with the mother-country increased in warmth, and at this point she becomes lost to the romance-loving vision,—for, alas for those who “love a lover,” and insist upon an ideal constancy! Lady Frankland was married, in the fourteenth year of her widowhood, to John Drew, a wealthy banker of Chichester, and at Chichester she died, in one year’s time. But after all, on that sober second thought which is so powerful in regilding a tarnished fancy, does not her remarriage suit still better the requirements of romance? For instead of dying a staid Lady Frankland, her passions merged in the vital interests of caps and lap-dogs, she transmutes herself into another person, and thus fades out into an unrecognized future. Since neither the name of Surriage nor Frankland is predominant in its legend, even her tomb seems lost; and the mind goes ever back in fancy to her maiden name, her maiden state, when she was the disguised and humble princess of Marblehead.
MARTHA HILTON
