“If I have had good fortune,” he used to say, “it is because of the shoemaker’s luck-penny. If people come to me it is only because they know that I am a hampered fellow and cannot well go to them. It is kindness of heart and that alone that brings a portion of the great world past my doors.”
It was a strange and motley procession that went in and out of the great house, for half of his guests were dressed in frieze and homespun, while the other half came clad in satins and velvets and gold-laced scarlet coats.
Gone now were the old times of rigid economy and stern simplicity among the Puritans. Men wore bright-coloured uniforms, lace ruffles and great powdered wigs, while the women, with their jewels, their patches, their high, red heels and long brocaded trains, were as gorgeously arrayed as the ladies of the English court. There used to be noble gatherings in Stephen’s big dining-room, when the greatest men in the land sat about his board and the tall wax tapers shone upon the officers’ red coats and jewelled orders, upon the ladies’ powdered hair and diamonds and upon the more soberly rich garb of the wealthy Massachusetts citizens. A throng of black-faced servants, themselves decked out in livery and powdered wigs, would wait upon the company and later conduct them into the long white-panelled drawing-room whose open windows looked out across the garden to the sea. Or, if it were winter, the guests would gather about the fireplace which, although much of the house was new, was the same rough stone one built by Master Simon’s hands. Amid this gay crowd of friends moved Stephen, quiet-mannered and simply clad, the only ornament upon his dark coat a diamond star given him by the King of France.
That was a time, also, when the garden bloomed in greater glory than it had ever known before. Those to whom Stephen had done good, and these were a countless legion, could give him nothing in return in the way of money or high office, for such rewards he did not want. But the royal Governors could send him costly fruit-trees from their English estates, poor sailors could bring him rare plants from foreign lands and his good friends of Hopewell could offer him the best they had of flower or fruit. The gardener used to say that Master Sheffield gave away so many plants and flowers that soon there would be nothing left, but that is the usual talk of gardeners. This one, with his acres of many coloured blossoms could not say, generous as Stephen was, that the danger of stripping the garden was a great or an immediate one.