You must remember that Patty Rutter was a Friend, a Quaker, perhaps a descendant of William Penn, but then, in her baby days, having been transplanted to the rugged soil and outspoken ways of Massachusetts, she could not keep silence altogether, in view of that which greeted her vision.
She was in the very midst of old friends. Chairs in which she had sat in her young days stood about the grand hall. On the walls hung portraits of the ancestor kings of the nation born at Philadelphia in 1776.
In royal robes and with careless grace, lounged King George III., the nation’s grandfather, angry no longer at his thirteen daughters who strayed from home with the Sons of Liberty.
Her feet made haste and her eyes opened wider, as her swift hands seized relic after relic. She sat in chairs that Washington had rested in; 156 she caught up camp-kettles used on every field where warriors of the Revolution had tarried; she patted softly La Fayette’s camp bedstead; and wondered at the taste that had put into the hall two old, time-worn, battered doors, but soon found out that they had gone through all the storm of balls that fell upon the Chew House during the battle of Germantown.
She read the wonderful prayer that once was prayed in Carpenter’s Hall, and about which every member of Congress wrote home to his wife.
On a small “stand,” encased in glass, she came upon a portrait of Washington, painted during the time he waited for powder at Cambridge. Patty Rutter had seen it often, with its halo of the General’s own hair about it. She turned from it, and beheld (why, yes, surely she had seen that, but not here; it was, why long ago, in her baby days in Philadelphia, that Mrs. Rutter had taken her up into a tower to see it), a bell—Liberty Bell, that rang above the heads of the Fathers when the Nation was born.
Poor little Patty began to cry. Where could she be? She reached out her hand, and climbed the huge beams that encased the bell, and tried to touch the tongue. She wanted to hear it ring again, but could not reach it.
“It’s curious, curious,” she sobbed, wiping her eyes and turning them with a thrill of delight upon a beloved name that greeted her vision. It 157 was growing dark, and she might be wrong. But no, it was the dear name of Adams; and she saw, in a basket, a little pile of baby raiment. There were dainty caps and tiny shirts of cambric, whose linen was like a gossamer web, and whose delicate lines of hem-stitch were scarcely discernible; there were small dresses, yellow with the sun color that time had poured over them, and they hung with pathetic crease and tender fold over the sides of the basket.
The little woman paused and peered to read these words, “Baby-clothes, made by Mrs. John Adams for her son, John Quincy Adams.”
“Little John Quincy!” she cried, “A baby so long ago!” She took the little caps in her hands, she pulled out the crumpled lace that edged them. She said, through the swift-falling tears: