preposterous old ladies in the newspapers, who have all their faculties
unimpaired, but a real old lady, whose ninety-nine years were beginning
to tell on her--who had known Washington very well. She was a girl in
her teens when he came to Portsmouth. The President was the staple of
her conversation during the last ten years of her life, which she passed
in the Stavers House, bedridden; and I think those ten years were in a
manner rendered short and pleasant to the old gentlewoman by the memory
of a compliment to her complexion which Washington probably never paid
to it.

The old hotel--now a very unsavory tenement-house--was built by John
Tavers, innkeeper, in 1770, who planted in front of the door a tall
post, from which swung the sign of the Earl of Halifax. Stavers had
previously kept an inn of the same name on Queen, now State Street.

It is a square three-story building, shabby and dejected, giving no hint
of the really important historical associations that cluster about it.
At the time of its erection it was no doubt considered a rather grand
structure, for buildings of three stories were rare in Portsmouth. Even
in 1798, of the six hundred and twenty-six dwelling houses of which the
town boasted, eighty-six were of one story, five hundred and twenty-four
were of two stories, and only sixteen of three stories. The Stavers inn
has the regulation gambrel roof, but is lacking in those wood ornaments
which are usually seen over the doors and windows of the more prominent
houses of that epoch. It was, however, the hotel of the period.

That same worn doorstep upon which Mr. O'Shaughnessy now stretches
himself of a summer afternoon, with a short clay pipe stuck between
his lips, and his hat crushed down on his brows, revolving the sad
vicissitude of things--that same doorstep has been pressed by the feet