Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.

“ O Damsel Dorothy! Dorothy Q.!
Strange is the gift that I owe to you;
Such a gift as never a king
Save to daughter or son might bring, -—
All my tenure of heart and hand,
All my title to house and land;
Mother and sister and child and wife
And joy and sorrow and death and life! ”

“ On her hand a parrot green
Sits unmoving and broods serene.
Hold up the canvas full in view, —
Look! There’s a rent the light shines through,
Dark with a century’s fringe of dust, —
That was a Red-Coat’s rapier thrust! ”

“ She was also the aunt of a second Dorothy Quincy, who became the wife of John Hancock, President of the first Continental Congress.
The painting hung in the house of my grandfather, Oliver Wendell, which was occupied by British officers before the evacuation of Boston. One of these gentlemen amused himself by stabbing poor Dorothy (the pictured one) as near the right eye as his swordsmanship would serve him to do it. The canvas was so decayed that it became necessary to remount the painting, in the process of doing which the hole made by the rapier was lost sight of. ”