"I fear there are no strawberries there now, though the first settlers are said to have built the Great House in the centre of ground covered with wild strawberry-vines. There's little to see there now, though you have enough imagination to picture where the Great House stood in the time of Mason."
So they went down on Water Street, and thence to the substantial little house where Washington's secretary, Tobias Lear, lived. Here Washington himself called on Madame Lear when he visited Portsmouth soon after his inauguration.
As they turned back toward the statelier mansions of Congress and Pleasant Streets, Clare tried to fit the things she had heard about old Portsmouth to the right persons and people.
"I remember that some distinguished French nobleman described the Langdon House as elegant and well furnished. Washington, too, called it the handsomest house in Portsmouth, and when Louis Philippe was in exile here, he lived for some time in this house. But I like this old Wentworth House better because I really remember one of the romantic stories connected with it."
"Tell me, please."
"Oh, this is simply about Frances Wentworth who jilted her cousin John because he was too poor. John went to England, and Frances married Theodore Atkinson, who was rich and amiable and delicate. In the course of time John Wentworth returned from London as governor of the Province, and when two years later the husband of Frances died, she mourned only ten days, and then became the bride of her cousin John. But here we are at Cousin Mary's, and I ought to have left this story for her. She can tell it so dramatically."
Cousin Mary lived near the old Warner house, and she had much to say to the girls about a former owner of this historic dwelling, whom her mother remembered as one of the last of the townsmen to wear a cocked hat and knee-breeches. After luncheon she took her young visitors to call at the Warner mansion, where they saw the curious wall paintings that no one had known about, until the removal of several layers of paper brought the paintings to the light a few years ago.
"You can see how little this house has been changed," said the owner, proudly. "It is really an eighteenth century house of the best type."
"Such as Amy Wentworth dwelt in," added Martine, reciting.
"'With stately stairways worn
By feet of old Colonial knights,
And ladies gentle-born.
And on her from the wainscot old
Ancestral faces frown,
And this has worn the soldier's sword,
And that—the judge's gown?'