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��THE HOME OF LADY WENTWORTH.
��Vandyke's, representing Lord Strafford dictating to his secretary on the night before his execution, is quite promi- nent, as is also a portrait of Queen Christina of Sweden. The others are portraits of the governor's ancestors and relatives, among which is that of the beautiful Dorothy Quincey. This last is by Copley, and represents the colo- nial belle when she was about twenty years old. She wears, I think, a blue silk dress, cut in the Maria Stuart fash- ion, and fitting closely the queenly fig- ure. The face is fair, with a pair of laughing blue eyes and a lovely mouth, framed in a mass of hair as golden as any of the Venetian beauties whom Titian has celebrated, and resting upon a neck as white and graceful as a swan's. Dorothy was the daughter of Judge Edward Quincey of Braintree, and was a niece of Gov. Wentworth. After having many suitors, Aaron Burr being one of them, the pretty and viva- cious coquette married the princely merchant and distinguished patriot, John Hancock.
At the entrance of the Council Chamber are seen the racks for the twelve guns, carried when occasion re- quired by the governor's guards. In the Billiard Room, which adjoins this apartment, still remains the ancient spinet, now time-worn and voiceless, but whose keys have many a time been touched by the jeweled white fingers of aristocratic belles. Washington listened to its music once when he visited here in 1790, the guest of the hospitable Colonel Wentworth. Here, too, is seen in one corner, the old buffet which in the olden time has held many a full and empty punch bowl. Opening out of the larger apartment are little side rooms where illustrious guests, General London, Admiral Boscawen, Lord Pep- perell and many others, have played at cards and other games until the " wee sma' hours." About the whole hall there is a choice venerableness which the antiquarian can fully appreciate.
On the left hand of the great hall, stretches away, room after room which are in daily use by the household. Through the courtesy of the proprietor,
��I was permitted to visit the kitchen, dining, and sitting-room, and view the ancient commissariat of the governor, which was made on an extensive scale. The view from the west windows of the dining-room is as fine as any from the house, combining both land and ocean scenery. The old governor, good liver as he was, never was troubled with dys- pepsia. The reason is evident, viz : good digestion, superinduced by the delightful prospect visible from his table.
In the second story a stranger would be very liable to get lost. The winding passages and numerous rooms are per- plexing. The old house contained fif- ty-two rooms, formerly, every one of them wainscoted, but some of them have been given over entirely to rats. The State Chamber is immediately above the parlor, and is an elegant and luxurious apartment. On one side, the windows look down into the garden with its old box-bordered walks and its blossoming beauties of leaf and flower. Fruit trees were blushing scarlet and purple with flowers, the Pyrus Japonica shamed the sunlight with its gorgeous crimson bloom, and the odors rose from the white starred Spiraea and Dedtzia gracilis. It was very natural that the lines should suggest them- selves.
"A brave old house, a garden full of bees, Large drooping poppies and green holly- hocks. With butterflies for crowns, trupeonies, And pinks and goldilocks. "
Many and many a time this bed chamber wooed the slumbers of the sybarite Benning Wentworth, and here on a dull Sunday, Oct. 14th, 1770, the great man breathed his last in the arms of his faithful wife. The governor re- warded her care and faithfulness by be- queathing her his entire estate. The great house was not long without a master, however. Lady Wentworth after living single about a year, fell into the matrimonial traces again, but with- out changing her name. She outlived her second husband several years, and at her death, in 1804, left the old man- sion to her daughter Martha, whom she
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