Chapter II: Part 2

The Moore girls who decorously occupied the Orleans sofas all through the calling hours soon began to notice the couple who so often left the circle. In the morning at the breakfast-table there were often sly innuendoes that Dr. Moore, absorbed in his _Herald_, never paid any attention to and Mrs. Moore could not understand. She would have, though, if she had observed the burning roses in a maiden's cheeks and the angry eyes of the youth opposite glaring at his tormentors.

"Oh, girls, did you observe the new moon last night?" Jane Moore would innocently ask. "Ellen, you must have." Then how they would giggle.

"Hush, girls!" Mrs. Moore would say as she poised her Wedgwood coffee-cup and gazed around the table. "Young ladies in your station of life should never laugh so loudly; it is not genteel."

Some of the young fellows who called at the house were not so observing as the Moore girls. Freddy Frelinghuysen used to try and keep the pretty country cousin by his side on one of the sofas when the sparking hour was on. Captain William Montgomery, just home from the West Indies, professed open admiration for a New York maiden who could spin.

"If you will spin me a shirt in an afternoon like the girls in Melrose used to make I will give you the handsomest lace dress to be found in the city," he once said.

"Agreed," she answered. "And if I fail I will give you the finest dress suit a tailor can make."

You may be sure that the proud sister-in-law of a bishop never heard of this wager. The girls kept it a secret.

"It is not anything, after all," Jane said to her sisters. "Ellen not being town bred, it will exonerate her."

Ned did not like the idea very much, but Ellen seemed so delighted at the chance to show her skill that he did not have the heart to dampen her pleasure with a lecture on the improprieties.

"I must remember that she is a bloom of the fresh free countryside, where life is broader and less restrained by convention," he said to himself. So Ellen was left to win her wager with happiness.

One morning Mrs. Moore announced from behind the George III. coffee-urn bearing the arms of the Fish family that she had decided to give a ball. "As the wife of a physician and the sister of a bishop, I feel it my duty to do something for society. Not a bread-and-butter affair like old Mrs. Hone gives; nor should I care to entertain the mob of vulgarians Mrs. Van Pelt does. Something elegant for the representative families, William," she said, giving her spouse's coffee-cup a conciliatory dash of cream.

"Oh, you lovely, lovely mamsey!" the Moore girls chorus. "No, we can't sit still," they cry, heedless of her admonishment. About the table they pirouette and out into the hall, almost knocking over the haughty, stout Miss Rattlebones whom Thomas is leading to the doctor's office.

"Won't it be simply perfect?" they keep asking Ellen. "We will have the waltz,--the new dance so fashionable abroad, you know."

"And 'The Devil among the Tailors' they had at Matilda Hoffman's the other night," Jane added.

"The what? The devil something do I hear you say?" asks Mrs. Moore, rolling her eyes in a horrified fashion. "We will never have that indecent dance in my abode."

What happy days followed Mrs. Moore's announcement, with the hundred things to be planned and finished! Every gallant who shared the Orleans sofas with the Misses Moore during those evenings before the great event was asked whether he preferred white or blue bunting for the parlor ceiling. Did he like the idea of pink roses in the Nast vases on the chimney-piece? Could he imagine the room lighted by five hundred candles? Wasn't it shocking that mother was contemplating serving five kinds of punch? The parlor was becoming a huge question mark and the Moore ball the talk of the city.

Ellen and her lover shared in all the preparations for the affair, but very often they stole out to their trysting-spot of an evening to be alone.

The fateful night before the ball the Argus eyes of Mrs. Moore descried them from her bedroom window seated under their favorite beech-tree. At first she thought the figures were Jane and Mr. Major. Then, blowing out her candle, the cruel spring starlight helped her to make out the forms of Nathaniel and Ellen. Like one fascinated, she watched them. The wind blew the silver leaves of the beech-tree and she learned their secret. He had kissed her. "Oh, it is dreadful!" she whispered to herself, murmuring like one who has received a shock. "They are first cousins. My Nathaniel loves her. I have been blind." The memory of the bantering words passed at table came back to her with a new meaning. Why, only the other day William, her younger son, had told her that Nathaniel was in Brooke's getting the rents of Gansevoort Street houses. The ball had driven everything else from her mind. The affair must be broken off at once. She would seek William.

Doctor Moore was seated by a hickory-wood fire in an adjoining apartment, ensconced in a flowered chintz dressing-gown. The bustle of preparation for the past few days had annoyed him, but the spirit of peace now seemed to have found a place in the wide firelit room. A negress was passing a warming-pan lightly over the lavender-scented sheets of the high four-poster. It was an old-fashioned winter custom that the doctor demanded all through the spring. The air was filled with the dreamy scents of lavender and the pungent odor of the hickory boughs. The fire made the tired man close his eyes, and the ponderous medical treatise dropped to the floor. Morpheus was wooing him when the startling figure of Mrs. Moore, with her nightcap awry and her hair falling over her shoulders, entered the room, bringing him back to the world he was trying to forget. The walls of the old room heard sad things that night. Young hearts that had blossomed out like twin buds on a stem were to be torn asunder. Their little beech-tree in the garden seemed to be aware of impending disaster, and the dreary sighing of its leaves suddenly fell upon the two by the fire. The night was nearly dead.

"Perhaps, after all, Jane, we have been premature with our worrying and there is nothing between them," the weary father said. "I will see Nathaniel in the morning. Now go to bed, dear; you know to-morrow is your ball, and that will bring you many duties."

The mystical to-morrow. Like some wan and beggared guest, it tapped on the panes of the great Moore mansion. The cold starlight had not fulfilled its promise, and the face of the day was old before the world was up to see it. Outside the Moore gates it was all gray mist, and yet many of the household looked at it happily. The cooks sang as they worked over the breakfast by candle-light. In a week's time they had prepared a roomful of good things for the children of pleasure to eat that night.

Thomas chuckled gleefully as he showed his new red-and-gold party livery to the company below stairs. He knew that he was a very handsome nigger, and many a lady's maid would smile at him as she followed her mistress through the hall when the ball commenced. None of the ladies appeared at breakfast, and after the last dish was removed Doctor Moore asked Nathaniel to follow him to the office.

"Nathaniel," the father said, motioning his son to a seat, "your mother saw your conduct in the garden last night with Miss Conover, and I wish to know its meaning."

The young man had refused to be seated, and stood by one of the windows gazing out into the mist. The grayness filled him with a vague intimation of approaching trouble. Ellen's name was its first sense of realization. "I love Miss Conover," he answered, almost unconsciously.

The old physician in the stiff-backed desk-chair knit his brow and pulled his stock up higher about his throat, an action familiar to his patients. He seemed lost in thought. In front of him was his desk covered with medicine phials, but here was a case that no medicine he could give would help.

"My son," he said, and the clock accentuated the huskiness of his voice. "My son, you have no right to love Miss Conover. She is your first cousin, and you can never marry her. It is a hopeless love."

"Other men have married their cousins, sir. There are Jonathan Kortright and Hulda Reid, and Chauncey Prince----"

"Yes, Nathaniel," the doctor's voice interrupted his passionate speech, "the world is full of law-breakers; but it is the edict of God that two of one flesh cannot marry. I should never countenance such a union. Your children would be accursed."

The glowing eyes of the young man were riveted on those older eyes drooping beneath the gray wig. Why didn't he storm and rage as he used to in the old days when a lad in torn nankeens and begrimed face was brought to that desk like a culprit before a tribunal of justice? He could see that his father pitied him. In the next room they were tacking up the wall decorations for the ball, and a monotonous tap, tap was joined to the maddening ticking of the clock.

Suddenly the youth rose to his full height before the old man and caught his weary eyes. "I shall marry her," he said. "I defy you, God, or the devil to stop me!"

The wrinkled, passive face before him seemed dazed and blurred. There was no answer. Oh, how cold and dreary the room looked! Life, after all, held very little. The fire died out in the youth's eyes. "My God, what a hell you have given me!" he cried. There was a knock at the door and the father rose to open it. In the middle of the floor he stopped and went up to his son. Upon the strong young arms he placed his feeble hands. "Be a brave man, my son," he said. "May God help you!"

In her aunt's room overhead Ellen was humming an air she remembered Miss Trelawny singing a week before at the Park, when Nathaniel had given a gay little theatre party to celebrate the winning of Captain Montgomery's gown. It had arrived only that morning from Madame Bouchard's on Cortlandt Street, and the black maid had spread it on a bed where the young ladies could admire it. Very beautiful were its soft folds of Machlin lace.

"You will be more like a partner of the fashionable Madame Moreau than a country girl to-night," Jane Moore told Ellen, as she and her sisters hurried off to deliver some of their mother's orders.

"Watch Ned's eyes, Jane, when he first sees her," Maria whispered, as she closed the bedroom door softly.

Ellen gazed out into the street. The mist was rising. Perhaps, after all, it would be a clear night. Through the gates came a ceaseless stream of flower men and women carrying wicker baskets piled high with early blooms; Fly-Market dealers with bundles of provisions; Mrs. Leach and some of the girls from the Broadway Frozen Cream Parlor to make the sherbets and syllabubs. A group of urchins and older busybodies were standing in the middle of the street gazing up at the windows.

"It would be grand to be rich and give parties like them foine birds," a chimney-sweep's wife remarked to the woman next to her.

"Now, don't ye envy them, miss," her companion replied. "Ye never can tell when ye look at a big house what's hiding behind the velvets afore the windows."

The grim Pompeys on the gates seemed to smile at her logic. And yet, after all, the darkness overhead was breaking away, and from out the sombre clouds the sky was spilling pale new-born sunshine over roofs and steeples and despairing streets.

Those who heard of the glories of the Moore ball in their youth are not likely ever to forget it: the music, the supper, the graciousness of host and hostess, and the company. There was a new Astor piano borrowed from the bishop to mingle its fresh voice with that of the tired Moore spinet and the playing of the Park's four violinists. The people who attended it, whose names were as well known then as the pure tones of Trinity's bells,--Le Roys, Rutgers, Gouverneurs, Beekmans, Jays, de Lanceys, Wilcoxes, Livingstons, Kissams, Kortrights, Clarksons, Schermerhorns, Van Pelts, Clarks, Varicks, Waddingtons, Van Santvoorts, Van Nests, Pells, Kembles, Fairlees, and Waters,--they were the great of 1807.

In the largest parlor, where the Orleans sofas are pushed ignominiously against the wall, youthful New York is whirling about to the strains of the Corporal Listnor waltz. Two belles of the evening the room contains,--Maria Mayo, of Virginia and New Jersey, who married General Winfield Scott, and Matilda Hoffman, the love of gay young Washington Irving. A third, and the most remarked of all that large company,--Ellen Conover,--has just passed through the doorway on the arm of Nathaniel Moore. A handsome couple they make,--she in her lace gown and he in dark plum-colored evening clothes. She is smiling, for she does not see the look of misery in his eyes.

"The stars are out, dear; shall we go into the garden and sit under our own little beech-tree?" she asks.

Our beech-tree! How the words sink into his soul and cut like knives!

"No, Ellen," he answers; "the leaves of the tree, so tender and young, are old and seared for us."

"Why, Nathaniel, how strange you talk!" she says. Then she looks into his white face and begins to understand.

Oh, the anguish of his drawn young face, as he folds her in his arms and tells her to be brave. Into the library she follows him. Her step has lost its buoyancy and the roses have died in her cheeks. A woman's intuition has guessed what he has to tell her. Something has come between them. Softly he closes the door on the lights, the music, and the babble of happy voices.

"Kiss me and never let me speak again, darling," he whispers. But she lets him speak--and break her heart.

Almost a century has passed since the dawn after the Moore ball when a girl stole down the slender staircase of that proud mansion. It was Ellen Conover garbed for a journey. Like the ghost of pleasure, she crept through the trellis-work of faded flowers which adorned the landing and hurried noiselessly over the slippery hall. No one was about but Thomas, who was picking up some of the motto papers and dead flowers strewn over the dining-room floor. Hearing the rustle of a woman's dress, he came to the door of that room and looked out with startled eyes.

"Why, missy, is you going abroad so early?" he asked, incredulously.

"Yes, Tom, I'm going back to Monmouth."

Seeing a question in his eyes, she continued,--

"Aunt will understand. I have left a note by her door."

In her hand she held a square deerskin bag, and the negro, not forgetting his manners in his bewilderment, asked whether he could carry it for her.

"Thanks, Tom," she said, wearily, as he relieved her of the heavy burden. "Colonel Montgomery is to be at the Broadway corner for me. He is going to Englishtown, and has promised to see me home. The Paulus Hook coach passes at seven, you know."

Beside the lyre-shaped hat-rack Ellen paused for a moment. Thomas thought that she was going to faint, but she beckoned for him to go on. Before her was Nathaniel's gray beaver, the one she had liked him in so much. She remembered he wore it that happy day they wandered down to Gansevoort Street to look at their little dream-house. Dear dream-house, that would never be theirs. The wistaria vine that twined so lovingly about the stoop-rail high up to the dormer window would never purple for them. Was he asleep now? She wondered what he would think of her running off in this fashion. "Perhaps it is foolish, but I could never stand seeing him again," she murmured to herself. On the floor were his riding-gloves, swept off the hat-rack by some heedless reveller of the night before. Like one lingering in a dream, she picked them up and tenderly put them in the pocket of her coat. For a moment she stood silent with her hand on the door in the attitude of one listening to a benediction. Outside a soughing wind was sweeping through the deserted street and the dark hall was full of its whispered sighs. Softly she opened the door on the new day, and then, as if speaking to an invisible presence, she said, "May you sometimes think of me as I shall always think of you, dear heart." And the sweetest part of the story is, he was faithful to her memory until death.

A TRUE PICTURE OF THE
LAST DAYS OF AARON BURR

A TRUE PICTURE OF THE LAST DAYS OF AARON BURR

An old house that has fallen to ruin always has something pathetic about it, but a great hostelry in the clutches of decay, where warmth and cheer have welcomed generations of travellers, is sadder still. In Port Richmond, Staten Island, there is still standing the Richmond Inn, suffering from the weight of many years. Erected before the war of 1812, until 1820 it was the home of the Mersereau family, who owned most of the surrounding land when the place bore the name of Mersereau's Ferry. The Mersereaus were Huguenots, and descended from two brothers who fled with their mother from France to America on the revocation of the Edict of Nantes. The Richmond Inn rests on the site of an earlier Mersereau mansion,--a witness of the Revolution. During the early part of the last century there were no buildings to shut off the view of the water-front, and its lawn ran down to a bluff overlooking the ferry landing and wharf. There Jed Simonson, a soldier who had fought at Monmouth, received the freight from the Jersey shore and the chance scow bearing Indian luxuries purchased from the hold of some newly-arrived merchantman. Great trees stood guard at the back of the inn like a troop of shadowy sentinels, and through them came sweet scents of the verdant country that rolled away over the British breastworks still covering the nearby hills. On the wide galleries of this haven of rest old sea-captains could always be seen gently dozing as they puffed long pipes in the sunlight, or perchance gazing through spy-glasses at the white sails flecking the harbor. The ocean underwent quick transitions as they rounded Cape Hatteras or struck the Gulf Stream, and the nautical yarns they spun of the "Merry Marys," "Saucy Belles," and "Swift Sallys" were ropes which led to the seamen's true Elysium.

At nightfall the mail-coach often drove up before the door with a load of happy guests and bore others away. Those were the days when social intercourse was a feature of tavern life. "Good-by! Good-by!" a dozen feminine voices would call as the gay party of Southerners departed on their long journey to Baltimore. Toasts of Calverts and St. Marys, tears and kisses and fluttering handkerchiefs before the coach rumbled past the little red general store into the darkness. And then later in the evening, when it was time for the candles, the young people remaining would assemble in the hall for a reel, made merrier by the jingly protests of the gold-legged Clementi piano. It was to this abode that Aaron Burr, world-weary and near death, was brought in 1836.

Aaron Burr, the courageous, was then sunk into an abyss so low that his enemies should have been satisfied. For years he had endured the censure of his fellows, the vituperation of Federalists and anti-Federalists, and the sneers of the populace without a murmur. Like the rock depicted on the old seal with which he used to stamp his letters, his lofty spirit had been unmoved by the winds and waves of public opinion. But now disease and old age had found him, and the spectre every human thing must some day face was his relentless pursuer. Until recently there was one living who remembered his arrival at the old hostelry. How the black stage-driver and a gentleman of the party assisted him up the steps to the door and then up the quaint staircase to the largest guest-room on the second floor. The spot is still shown where stood the ancient curtained bed he occupied. The wide, white carved mantel-piece where his tired eyes must have often rested has not been disturbed, and one of the old window-panes bears the sentence, scratched with a diamond, "All is vanity," which tradition says is his work.

Aaron Burr's career is a strange record of triumphs almost reached; the picture of a proud spirit tortured and frenzied by fate. The story has been handed down from generation to generation in the Edwards family, and is preserved among the papers of the late William Paterson, of Perth Amboy, that when Aaron Burr was an infant in the parsonage on Broad Street, Newark, his mother often prayed that her son should be as a star among men. Her prayer was answered, but not in the way she would have wished. From his mother Burr inherited that morbid sensitiveness which eventually proved his downfall. Esther Edwards never forgot some of the stings she had endured when painting fans in the manner of Watteau for the fashionable women of Boston. Her son always believed that Alexander Hamilton was the cause of his ruin in the eyes of Washington, the loss of the Presidency of the United States, and the constant blackener of his good name by tongue and pen. If the shadow of Hamilton had never crossed the path of Burr, the latter's name might have been glorious for all time.

In the Paterson papers on Princeton College, recently published under the title "Glimpses of Colonial Society and the Life at Princeton College, 1766-1773," we find recorded that "little Burr" was one of the most popular men of his class at "The College of New Jersey." "To see you shine as a Speaker would give great pleasure to your friends in general and to me in particular. You certainly are capable of making a good Speaker, dear Burr," that noble youth, William Paterson, wrote to him when leaving Princeton in 1772. Through Paterson we learn that Burr would go any length to serve a friend, wrote in a lady-like hand, and at sixteen was the admiration of the fair sex of Elizabethtown. This comrade and a few other of the jolly founders of the Cliosophic Society were the subjects of Burr's reminiscences in those last summer days when the sea-air stealing through his windows seemed to give him new life. The horrible nightmare of his later years was forgotten. He was a boy again at the little village of Princeton that his father loved, the sun shone on proud Nassau Hall, the Scotch silversmiths tinkered all day long in the shops lengthening the Main Street, the lights glowed in the tavern, and fair Betsy Stockton was the belle and toast of the College.

Almost every stage of Aaron Burr's life is tinged with melodramatic interest, and it is fitting that the woman who befriended him in his last years should have been the daughter of a British soldier met on the battle-field of Quebec. There Burr saw the gallant Richard Montgomery and his own college-mate, John Macpherson, stain the snow with their blood, and it is a disputed tradition that Burr carried the wounded Montgomery from the field. The name of the generous soul who cared for him after his disastrous marriage with Madame Jumel and subsequent removal from Mrs. Hedden's house in Paulus Hook was Mrs. Joshua Webb. It has been written that she kept a boarding-house in the old Jay mansion, a proud dwelling in New York's history, and sheltered her father's friend at the risk of fortune and reputation. Madame Jumel, towards the close of her life, used to relate that she offered him pecuniary aid at that period, but it was proudly refused.

In his basement room at Mrs. Webb's, propped up in bed by his faithful black servant Kester, or Keaser, as the name is sometimes written, Burr received his old friends. There John Vanderlyn, the youth from Kingston whom he befriended, and who became a famous painter, celebrated for his "Marius," would visit him; there, too, came Judge Ogden Edwards, then residing in the Dongan manor-house at West New Brighton, Colonel Richard Conner, and a few other faithful ones whose names are unrecorded. The portrait of his lost Theodosia, who stands forth in history as the noblest of daughters, hung in front of the bed. Through the window he could obtain glimpses of familiar streets where he had once walked with his wife, Theodosia Prevost, the lovely niece of the eccentric Thomas Bartow, of Amboy. But they were changing. The abode on Maiden Lane, his first New York house, was destroyed, and the larger mansion at the corner of Nassau and Cedar Streets was also gone. Richmond Hill, one of the most beautiful country-seats in New York, where, in her fourteenth year, Theodosia presided over her father's board and conversed with the greatest men of the day, was then covered by Varick Street, and St. John's Park, which was in the beginning of its glory. At the little Maiden Lane house his wife had penned him many of her beautiful letters. Her ghost must have often come before him as he read over the faded epistle written one stormy night after he had left her for New Jersey, in which she outpoured for him her ardent love:

"Thus pensive, surrounded by gloom, thy Theo sat, bewailing thy departure. Every breath of wind whistled terror; every noise at the door was mingled with hope of thy return, and fear of thy perseverance, when Brown arrived with the word--embarked--the wind high and the water rough. Heaven protect my Aaron; preserve him, restore him to his adoring mistress. A tedious hour elapsed, when our son was the joyful messenger of thy safe landing at Paulus Hook. Stiff with cold how must his papa have fared? Yet grateful for his safety I blessed my God. I envied the ground which bore my pilgrim. I pursued each footstep. Love engrossed his mind; his last adieu to Bartow was the most persuasive token. 'Wait till I reach the opposite shore that you may bear the glad tidings to your trembling mother.' O, Aaron, how I thank thee! Love in all its delirium hovers about me; like opium it lulls me to safe repose! Sweet serenity speaks, 'tis my Aaron presides. Surrounding objects check my visionary charm. I fly to my room and give the day to thee."

New York was undergoing a great transition. She was outgrowing her maidenhood, and her swift feet took sure foothold in meadow, swamp, and woodland. To these changes Burr was unconscious. He had known her well and loved her, but when his clear brain grew listless and his eyes lost their fire she cast him out. Soon came the day when he was to look at the familiar sights for the last time. Tears filled his eyes as he gazed from the deck of the primitive steamboat which voyaged twice a day from the Battery to Staten Island. He knew that it was his last farewell, and the calloused heart was melted. In that sad moment his friend must have held his feeble hand. The world had not deprived him of everything--there was something at the last!

When Aaron Burr was brought to the Richmond Inn, the hostelry was kept by Daniel Winant, a man of Dutch descent. He was assisted in his task by two young daughters, who were the life of the little hamlet. Old Port Richmond residents used to tell of their kindness to the famous guest, nursing him devotedly and doing all in their power to shield him from the annoyance of curious strangers who journeyed to the Port to gaze upon him.

Among the guests stopping at the hotel during Burr's last days there was a young man of twenty-four by the name of Olando Buel, from New Preston in Connecticut. The quizzical, genial Olando in his little shop, cutting posies and weeping willows on tombstones or making tall mahogany clocks with wonderful embellishments, still lives in the minds of many of the islanders. In God's acres, which lie north and south and east and west over this isle of the great State of New York, Olando's white blooms cover many and many a green mound. What a great man was Olando, to record the lives of a small army of humanity! Sweet were the emblems he placed over their faded lives. Close to the specimens of his handiwork are older stones on which are figured skulls and other cruel reminders of death; but Olando gave his tired ones the emblems of nature, the never-ceasing resurrection. The elements are sweeping away some of his trees and flowers, it is true, for this youth from New England came to cut tombstones as a travelling apprentice to one Thompson, in the spring before Aaron Burr thought of Staten Island as his last home.

Olando frequently occupied a seat next to Burr on the gallery, and in after-years the interested visitor could always induce him to relate his memories of this time. The favorite among his stories was of Mrs. Webb's arrival at the inn to obtain a last look at the face of her old friend the morning after his death. Olando had prepared the body for its final resting-place the night before and was still in charge of the remains. Mrs. Webb came heavily veiled and accompanied by her small daughter. In the hall they waited until the chamber of death was deserted, and then timidly crossed its threshold. When the passionate tears of this noble woman fell on the withered face of the dead, the heart of her observer was touched, and he gazed on the scene with wet eyes.

Several times during the months of July and August Burr took rides back into the country. The Ogden chaise, drawn by a bay horse, would stop at the Inn in the afternoon while the sun was still high. Tommy, the lad who kept the garden path clean for the soft crinolines that caressed it in the late afternoon and early evening, never neglected an opportunity to leave the slouching weeds for the excitement of running up the steep steps and hammering the heavy knocker, calling out in the shrill trumpet tones of youth, "Here's the chaise for Colonel Burr! Here's the chaise." The buxom calico-clad figure of one of the Misses Winant would open the door, and through the hall and up the narrow winding staircase would rush the boy. Out on the gallery, in the depths of the old cushioned draught chair, an expectant figure always sat waiting for the near approach of those eager, clattering feet. With the boy's help he rises tremblingly, and we see him there in the sunlight,--a slight, emaciated old man in a Continental blue coat, a thin, worn face which has lost all the beauty of his famous likeness given to the world by Stuart's brush, but eyes still lustrous and ofttimes full of fire. Into the shadows, down the staircase and the porch, the strong young arms of the boy almost carry him. After them comes the faithful Miss Winant with Burr's great-coat, carefully treading on tiptoe lest she should attract his attention to her heavy burden. With the united efforts of the coachman, the boy, and his landlady, Burr is seated in the chaise. The coachman cracks his whip over the plodding mare, and the old-style vehicle bearing its precious burden rounds the corner into a world of green.

A pathetic and almost tragic picture of Burr has been recorded on one of these drives. On a gray, melancholy afternoon, while being driven through a neighboring village, he passed a group of rustic militia attempting a drill. His old eyes lighted up as he gazed upon them, and his mind went back to the time when he wore regimentals in the service of his country.

Calling out to the wind, for no one was by his side, he is said to have exclaimed,--

"Why, one might have fancied these yokels as having just ravelled off Washington's pet brigade! Washington! oh, Washington!"

Until the carriage had left the village far behind he continued to hold communion with himself. The twilight was enveloping him. He saw the youthful hero, Burr, storming the heights of Quebec, rescuing the brigade of General Knox, routing the enemy at Hackensack; now starving at Valley Forge and again enduring the hell of Monmouth. With ghosts from out the past he lived again.

Through the summer Burr lingered on at the old hostelry until September 14, 1836, when his tired eyes closed forever. At noon Dr. Van Pelt, the minister of the nearby Dutch Reformed Church whom Burr had refused so often to see, came on his last visit of consolation. Through his life he declared that Burr's death was one of peace, despite the many stories to the contrary.

History has never clearly revealed those who grouped themselves about his bedside, but this we know: by the door stood the Misses Winant and a few humble friends his last days had brought him. Their tears were among the most heartfelt shed over the courageous one whose dreams were delusions and great deeds ashes.

THE POETIC COURTSHIP OF
PHILIP FRENEAU, THE POET
OF THE REVOLUTION, AND
BEAUTIFUL ELEANOR FORMAN

THE POETIC COURTSHIP OF PHILIP FRENEAU, THE POET OF THE REVOLUTION, AND BEAUTIFUL ELEANOR FORMAN

Over a hundred years ago, in the most luxuriant part of Monmouth County, a garden spot of New Jersey, two large white houses smiled at each other through the changing seasons across a long vista of billowing field. The one nearest the sea was Mount Pleasant Hall, the home of the Freneaus, and the other, on the outskirts of Freehold, was Forman Place, the home of the Formans. Tall trees lined the narrow roads that crept so lovingly about them, grain and fruit grew in abundance on their broad acres, and flowers filled the gardens. Surely it was an ideal setting for a poetic courtship.

In the history of American belles-lettres it would be hard to find a more interesting couple than Philip Freneau, the poet of the Revolution, and the Jersey beauty he made his bride. Their life was the sweetest of pastorals. Like two brilliant butterflies, they flitted through years softly tinctured with shadows. When the world ill-used them, they sought refuge at the Pierian spring. Calliope was their sure consoler, and it was only when their gay wings were crushed and broken at the last that they forgot her.

Both belonged to distinguished families counted among the gentry class of the time. The Freneaus were descended from the Huguenot house of De Fresneau, famous in the history of La Rochelle. André Freneau, the poet's grandfather, upon his arrival in New York identified himself with the Royal West India Company of France. His associates in its interest were Auguste Jay and Étienne Delancey, two men of prominence in the early city. He is several times mentioned in the Journal of John Fontaine, who visited New York in 1716. His son, Pierre Freneau, resided in one of the finest dwellings on old Frankfort Street, and there his wife held a miniature court for the French society that found its way to the Dutch city flourishing under the English flag.

The Formans came from as notable stock as the Freneaus. One of their ancestors was a Lord Mayor of London, and Lady Mary Forman is recorded as dazzling New Orleans with her finery at the beginning of the eighteenth century. Tradition says that Mrs. Samuel Forman, a jolly dame and a leader of the old Monmouth neighborhood, used to ride to the Tennent Church in a golden coach. It was at that old church, close by the battle-field of Monmouth, that Philip Freneau first saw his Nelly and grew to love her.

Little Tennent has borne the marks of time lightly since the youth and the maiden shyly gazed at each other across the narrow aisle. Very sweetly her voice would ring out to the gay-tuned airs, for the music was lively in Tennent after that good nomadic dominie, George Whitefield, introduced the fashion of theatrical music in church. It was an often-repeated county jest in Monmouth that no one could fall asleep in the Tennent Church, the pews were so hard and straight-backed, and the choir so noisy.

Eleanor Forman was of a type which has always appealed to the poets. Her features were regular, her eyes blue and languishing, and her hair the color of pale sunshine. So fair and lasting was her complexion that, as an old lady, a Freehold gallant compared it to "the lilies and garden pinks." In those long-dead Sabbaths Freneau and his boy friends, home on vacations from the College of New Jersey, no doubt thought her a very attractive picture as she nestled by her mother's rich beflowered brocade, a tiny figure in white muslin and soft ribbons. James Madison saw her then, and, although she was too young for his companionship, he never forgot her charm, and in after-years, when she had entered the poet's life, he was one of the most loyal frequenters of her little salon in Philadelphia during Washington's second administration.

Although Philip Freneau, as an elderly gentleman given to reminiscence, used to relate that Eleanor Forman crept into his heart in his boyhood before he became a wandering pedagogue, it was not until long after his arrival at manhood's estate that she stormed and took the citadel. There was another romance in his life before his Nelly. At the immature age of sixteen he fell in love with a Jersey maiden residing near his home, whose name is lost to posterity. She died early of consumption, and the poet's verses at the time show his melancholy state of mind.

In "The Power of Fancy" he wrote of her:

"Fancy, stop and rove no more,
Now, tho' late returning home,
Lead me to Belinda's tomb;
Let me glide as well as you
Through the shroud and coffin, too.
And behold, a moment, there
All that once was good and fair.
Who doth here so soundly sleep?
Shall we break this prison deep?
Thunders cannot wake the maid,
Lightnings cannot pierce the shade,
And tho' wintry tempests roar,
Tempests shall disturb no more."

Another of his poems, entitled "Amanda in a Consumption," tells the whole pitiful story of his misplaced passion. We sympathize with a lover who was no more than a boy when we read:

"When wandering in the evening shade,
I shared her pain and calmed her grief,
A thousand tender things I said,
But all I said gave no relief:
When from her hair I dried the dew
She sighed and said--'I'm not for you.'"

There is an old saying that "love weeping burns away," and soon the boy ceased to write lamentations over his lost Belinda. Events were crowding thick and fast into his life at this time; years of travel and excitement had helped him to forget her; and when he returned to "the old house at Monmouth" on a summer day in 1780, weary of war and ill from long incarceration in a British prison-ship, he was in a state of mind to fall in love with the little Nelly of old Tennent days.

Like Philip Freneau, who had written from his earliest childhood, Eleanor Forman began the indulgence of her muse in her teens. One of her books still in existence shows her first thoughts put into verse. "Lines to a Lady's Singing-Bird" are scribbled over a copper print of a placid shepherdess, and words ready for rhyming embellish some of the margins. The pompous Mrs. Forman was very proud of her daughter's accomplishment, and it is said that, on Eleanor's composing some tributary verses to her mother's pet gray turkey, she presented her with a pair of paste shoe-buckles whose glitter affected the heart of every Monmouth maid and swain.

Beside Freneau's own stream running through the valley of young pine-trees near the Hall the romantic Eleanor loved to come to dream. There one day she found another dreamer, and the chance meeting was the beginning of one of the most poetic love-affairs.

This pleasant stream was almost a human thing to the poet. In the days before he found his Eleanor seated on its bank he addressed to it his last musings on the vanished Belinda:

"Where the pheasant roosts at night,
Lonely, drowsy, out of sight,
Where the evening breezes sigh,
Solitary, there stray I.

"Close along the shaded stream,
Source of many a youthful dream,
Where branchy cedars dim the day,
There I muse and there I stray."

Later, with "the fairest of women" by his side, when Belinda had grown to be only a memory, he composed his exquisite poem, "Retirement:"

"A hermit's house beside a stream,
With forests planted round,
Whatever it to you may seem,
More real happiness I deem
Than if I were a monarch crown'd.

"A cottage I could call my own,
Remote from domes of care;
A little garden, wall'd with stone,
The wall with ivy overgrown,
A limpid fountain near,

"Would more substantial joys afford,
More real bliss impart,
Than all the wealth that misers hoard,
Than vanquished worlds, or world's restored--
Mere cankers of the heart!

"Vain, foolish man! how vast thy pride,
How little can thy wants supply!--
'Tis surely wrong to grasp so wide--
We act as if we only had
To triumph--not to die!"

Reading its faded original, we hear the strong, mellifluous voice of the poet that the ladies of Charleston used to grow enthusiastic over when he visited his brother Peter in that city, and our minds grow retrospective, leading us back through the years to the couple by the little silver thread of water which long ago gave up its life to some mysterious unknown ocean. What a joyous thing it is when she is near him to listen to his words and share in his flights of fancy! The wind whispers through the pine-trees, and their soft sighing mingles with the gurgling cadences of the wavelets and breaks up the sunlit silence. The wind is a dream wind, and brings to them both sweet visions of the future. The house, surrounded by walls "with ivy overgrown" and "remote from domes of care," where he longs to take her, is almost a reality. Fate is a hag old and blind, and Life is a song from a charmed lute.

Soon after his meeting with Nelly Forman, Freneau wrote his tragedy of "Major André," which was never presented before the footlights. It is not known whether he ever gave it to a printer, and only fragments of his manuscript are in existence to-day. A portion of it shows us the unfortunate André pleading for his life before a tribunal, and as we finger the time-stained paper, desecrated by the household accounts of later years, a tearful Eleanor rises up before us, listening to the impassioned reading of her poetic lover.

For his "Major André" Freneau wrote a prologue, which he afterwards changed and permitted to be spoken at the opening of the Philadelphia Theatre. This he dedicated "to his Excellency General Washington."

"PROLOGUE

"_Written to a Theatrical Entertainment in Philadelphia, December, 1781._

"Wars, bloody wars and hostile Britain's rage
Have banished long the pleasures of the stage;
From the gay painted scene compell'd to part,
(Forget the melting of the heart)
Constrained to shun the bold theatric show,
To act long tragedies of real woe,
Heroes once more attend the comic muse;
Forget our failings, and our faults excuse.
In that fine language is our fable drest
Which still unrivall'd reigns o'er all the rest;
Of foreign courts the study and the pride,
Who to know _this_ abandon all beside;
Bold though polite, and ever sure to please;
Correct with grace, and elegant with ease;
Soft from the lips its easy accents roll,
Form'd to delight and captivate the soul;
In this Eugenia tells her easy lay
The brilliant work of courtly Beaumarchais;
In this Racine, Voltaire, and Boileau sung,
The noblest parts in the noblest tongue.
If the soft story in our play expressed
Can give a moment's pleasure to your breast,
To you, Great Sir! we must be proud to say
That moment's pleasure shall our pains repay.
Returned from conquest and from glorious toils,
From armies captured and unnumbered spoils;
Ere yet again, with generous France ally'd,
You rush to battle, humbling British pride;
While arts of peace thy kind protection share,
O let the Muses claim an equal care.
You bade us first our future greatness see,
Inspired by you, we languish'd to be free;
Even here where freedom lately sat distrest,
See a new Athens rising in the West!
Fair science blooms where tyrants reign'd before,
Red war reluctant leaves our ravag'd shore--
Illustrious hero, may you live to see
These new republics powerful, great, and free;
Peace, heaven-born peace, o'er spacious regions spread,
While discord, sinking, veils her ghastly head."

In the soft autumn twilights of the days that followed, when the yellow Morris turnpike grew vague and shadowy and the stars dotted the sky like little candles lighting up a hundred pieces of rose- and dusk-tinted velvet, Freneau would mount his faithful Cato and ride through the avenue of locust-trees into the lane leading to Forman Place. Dear to their hearts were these trysts of the lovers. There were walks in the Forman garden, made a place of enchantment by the breath of Indian summer. Later came songs in Madam Forman's chintz parlor. All through their lives Nelly sang to her Philip the love-ditties of sighing Darbys and unhappy Joans; and even after his death, when very aged, it is said that she sometimes crooned to his spirit in a queer cracked voice the songs he once loved to hear.

Forman Place, still standing close to the village of Freehold, what a place of memories it is! The tired, weather-beaten old building which the sunshine seems to desecrate was once one of the happiest of homes. Now, like some sleepy antique dame belated after a revelry, it waits despairingly by the turn of the road for Father Time and his band of winds to sweep it away. Broad-shouldered and broad-hearted Samuel Forman, with a rubicund visage made familiar by Hogarth, was an ideal host. Oh, the Merry-Andrews and the witlings Euphrosyne brought there! "Better one's house be too little one day than too big all the year after" was his motto, and bantering bucks were broadcast round his board.

And Madam Forman, who came of a pious family, but was married at fifteen, early caught the infection from her spouse. None could resist the laugh of the portly dame so redolent of good-humor. Tongues that wagged said her handmaidens were willing to work their fingers off in her service if she would let them. Her daughters she cajoled into the idea that they were wits as well as beauties, and men, from callow youth down to the very grandfathers of the parish, worshipped the ground she tripped upon. Whether gracing her chintz parlor, garbed in a lustrous grenadine, her powdered hair covered with a hundred ringlets that dangled and danced as she talked, or in humble linsey-woolsey overseeing the daily baking, the chance guest was always sure of a welcome from the mistress of Forman Place.

"Heigh-ho! there's Jeremy, Juniper, or Tobias. What a lark!" the great voice of her lord and master would come floating over the staircase or from the depths of the cushioned grandfather's chair in the library. "Yes, he's here, Samuel, and promised to sup," the echo would answer. It was to this happy haven the horseman rode very often after the meeting by the stream.

The days drifted into months and the months into years, and the drama of the Revolution was nearing its triumphant end for the patriot. Monmouth was awakening as from a lethargy. After the ravages it had endured through the early periods of the war, life had become stagnant. At Mount Pleasant Hall Freneau had written many a stirring verse which had travelled from Concord to Yorktown, encouraging the ofttimes despairing soldiers. Not a memorable incident escaped his watchful eye. Behind the ardent and passionate desire for liberty was the inspiration of love to guide his pen. The love of country and the love of woman were intertwined, and it was his thrilling visions of the first that brought sweet dreams of the other real one to camp-fire and battle-field. Liberty was a strange and beautiful goddess that those tattered, wearied men knew not, and it was always the memory of the sweetheart's face that spurred them over rock-bound roads filled with multitudinous obstacles in quest of the shadowy creature. When they fell by the wayside or in the trenches, the look of peace on their white faces was not her doing, but the tender vows and the last kisses of the girls they had left behind them.

Soon came peace, and on its trail the last meeting of the lovers in the Forman garden. The gates of winter were open and all the gorgeous flower-children slumbering in the earth. By the golden sundial a solitary purple pansy bloomed, hoping that the false shimmer was the sun, and in Madam Forman's rose-bed yellow blushmaids were glowing at the bleak landscape like incense lamps on some dim altar. There had been a family conference in Forman Place the night before. Eleanor's brother David, the stern "Black David" of Germantown fame, who had recently laid down his gun and sabre by his father's hearth, was incensed at his sister's betrothal to the poet. Mrs. Freneau's fortune was almost depleted by the inroads of the war. "That scribbling fellow is no match for Eleanor," the warrior said. The household, seated about the heavy oaken table in the hall where the letters and the last _Gazette_ always lay, listened to his words of wisdom. Every one was always silent when David spoke, for his sentences were like nails,--something to be driven into the hearts of his hearers. No one could dispute him. "The Freneaus no longer kept up the state they flourished during their first years in Monmouth; a poet's pen could not support a wife! The engagement was worse than foolhardy. Many a man of wealth as well as parts would be seeking Eleanor."

Samuel, in the great Hepplewaite chair, was silent. The mirth lines about his mouth drooped and lengthened. He liked Freneau, whose ready tongue always held a jest. His blue-eyed Nelly loved him, he knew. Furtively he turned and stole a glance at his wife for help to stem the wrath of the stern dictator, but the good dame held a handkerchief to her eyes. Trouble weighed heavily on her heart. Eleanor stood by the door gazing out of the blurred panes at the road that led to the Freneaus. Her face was pale, but suffused with the light of love. Before her was the highway of Fate, and her heart told her that it would not admit of another.

"David," she said, looking at him, "you may be a great man in war counsel, but when a woman is the question you know naught. With the man I love I could wander penniless but unwearied all through life."

There was silence; then Madam Forman tried to speak, but her voice was choked with sobs.

And so it was that the lovers met in the dying garden and said good-by. She told him of her brother's words, and into his life there came a new desire. His country needed his pen no longer. The fortune his father's will gave to his mother had been placed on the altar of patriotism, and much of it went into the ship "Aurora," captured by the British. He would leave his home to seek another fortune, and, when it was won, return and claim her.

The air was sultry and the moon hung like a dying taper over their heads. The fields that crept up to the Homdel hills he loved so well were gray. A north wind sighed among the wraiths of summer in the garden, a harbinger that the dawn would be fresh and clear.

"I shall never marry any one else," she told him. "My window faces the bend of the road, and there I shall place a candle every night to light your steps when they bring you back to me. Often I shall go to the little stream and wonder where you are wandering. Never fear. I shall wait for you forever and forever, until my cheeks fade and my eyes grow dim."