Chapter III: Part 3

Like one of the flowers in the garden trying to hide its head from the death-stings of the wind, she nestled in his arms. The moon grew faint behind the clouds, and the soughing low and melodious, for a woman's heart was being spilled over the highway.

The next morning a small procession left Mount Pleasant Hall and crept over the Morris turnpike road to the Point. There were the poet and his mother in the antiquated chaise, Josiah, an old negro household slave, mounted on Cato, and several of the field servants, carrying a large wooden chest, following on foot. The air was fresh and strong, and, although the day was young, the blue of the sky deep and pure. John Burrowes's sailing-vessel was to leave Kearny Port, bound for Philadelphia, before the noon hour.

The sunshine played over the yellow, clay-stained road, and off in the distance the sea was a sheet of burnished gold. Some place where its arms spread was the promised land the poet hoped to find. There his work would bring him a reward that would help him to win his love.

At the Port the vessel was anchored in the calm inlet with her bowsprit pointed to the dancing waves beyond. Old Mrs. Burrowes, the corn merchant's wife, with some of her grandchildren, was on the wharf to see him off. When she saw the Freneau chaise, she ran forward to meet its occupants. "Yes, I am very sure my husband can take Mr. Freneau to Philadelphia," she said, in answer to their inquiries. Mrs. Freneau alighted and sat with her on one of the grain sacks while the poet went to seek Mr. Burrowes. All about them was bustle and confusion preparatory to a long cruise. Soon came the hour of leaving and the last farewells. Tears filled the mother's eyes as she kissed her son. Once before she had watched him depart to wrestle with the world beyond her quiet land. No cruel war was to claim him now, and yet she could not hide her anguish at parting. His own heart was full of courage and the breath of the sea was like wine to him. The fortune his mother had given to her country he would build again! As he embraced his mother, before his eyes was the face of the woman he thought the most beautiful in the world. She was worth the price of conquest.

After Philip left, Eleanor took to watching the highway. It had brought him to her, and in the dawn, the noonday, and the dusk she looked out upon it from the windows of her room, longing for his return. Every night she placed the candle in the farthest sill, as she promised him at parting. He was constantly in her thoughts. As time went on other suitors came to Forman Place to pay to her their addresses. Hezekiah Stout, the great mill-owner of Englishtown, was one of them. That Revolutionary Crœsus received more encouragement from David than from the lady of his choice. Hezekiah proved a patient lover, for when she refused to see him, he would sit silently blinking on the Forman settle for hours at a time, until Madam Forman, the best-natured woman in the world, vowed to herself that, with all his money, he was too stupid a man to wed her daughter.

And the little silver stream that whispered its secrets to the slim pine-trees, how it missed the pair! Many a time it wearily watched the winter wane and earth cast off her white mantle. The wild anemones came, the primroses and the crocuses and all that lovely company of fragile blooms which mark the footsteps of hope. "Oh, if he would but come now while I mirror so much beauty," the stream crooned to herself. Sometimes she would see among the flowers the reflection of the fair face he loved. Then the little stream was happy. "She at least remembers, and perhaps he will come soon," she sang in joy to the pine-trees. Then the grasses grew high, and the golden sunshine lured the dragon-flies to flit among the fragrant worlds along her course. Still he came not. She began to grow impatient. Perhaps her heart would be dried up before his children strolled by her side and waded in her clear water. The leaves began to fall, and the worlds along her course knew that the night was coming on. "He has forgotten," the stream moaned; "forgotten." And, hundreds of miles away, he heard her voice, and in the hold of an ice-bound ship wrote to his stream and his love, whom he called Cynthia, these tender verses:

"Through Jersey groves a wandering stream
That still its wonted music keeps
Inspires no more my evening dream,
Where Cynthia, in retirement, sleeps.

"Sweet murmuring stream, how blest art thou
To kiss the bank where she resides!
Where nature decks the beechen bough
That trembles o'er your shallow tides.

"The cypress-tree on Hermit's height,
Where love has soft addresses paid
By Luna's pale reflected light,
No longer charms me to its shade.

"To me, alas! so far removed,
What raptures, once, that scenery gave,
Ere, wandering yet from all I loved,
I sought a deeper, drearier wave.

"Your absent charms my thoughts employ,
I sigh to think how sweet you sung,
And half adore the painted toy
That near my careless heart you hung.

"Now, fettered fast in icy fields,
In vain we loose the sleeping sail;
The frozen wave no longer yields,
And useless blows the favoring gale.

"Yet still in hopes of vernal showers
And breezes moist with morning dew,
I pass the lingering, lazy hours
Reflecting on the spring--and you."

Mammon proved a cruel and elusive mistress to Freneau, and she led him many a fruitless errand in pursuit of her. For several years he commanded the brig "Washington," owned by his brother Peter. In this ship he made many journeys to the West Indies, and by clever trading at last succeeded in amassing a small competence. With this he returned to Mount Pleasant Hall after an absence of nearly six years.

In the spring of that year the lovers were united. The wedding held in Forman Place was a very simple affair, attended by only a few of the Monmouth neighborhood. After his marriage the poet took his bride home to Mount Pleasant Hall, and later to Philadelphia, where Mrs. Freneau's little salon played a part in the history of the capital. A diary of Freneau's life in that city is said to be in existence, and it is to be hoped that it will some day come to light.

The love-letters of the charming Freneaus, written for the most part in verse, were destroyed many years ago. Several of the poems compiled in the editions of Freneau's works are thought to have been written by his wife. Like Mrs. Wordsworth, who is credited with helping her husband with his masterpiece, "The Daffodils," Mrs. Freneau lent her deft hand to beautifying "The Wild Honeysuckle," the most exquisite poem written by an American in the eighteenth century.

"Fair flower that dost so comely grow,
Hid in this silent, dull retreat,
Untouched thy honey blossoms blow,
Unseen thy little branches greet;
No roving foot shall crush thee here,
No busy hand provoke a tear.

"By nature's self in white arrayed,
She bade thee shun the vulgar eye,
And planted here the guardian shade,
And sent soft waters murmuring by;
Thus quietly thy summer goes,
Thy days declining to repose.

"Smit with those charms, that must decay,
I grieve to see your future doom;
They died--nor were those flowers more gay,
The flowers that did in Eden bloom;
Unpitying frosts and autumn's power
Shall leave no vestige of this flower.

"From morning's suns and evening's dews
At first thy little being came;
If nothing once, you nothing lose,
For when you die you are same;
The space between is but an hour,
The frail duration of a flower."

One cannot read these verses without entering into a closer intimacy with "The Poet of the Revolution" and the beautiful Eleanor Forman. Their courtship was idyllic, and during the long stretch of years they walked together hand in hand the flame of love never diminished, but grew brighter. From the day of their marriage, when Freneau is recorded as having compared his blushing bride to Fielding's "Amelia," the ideal characterization of womanhood, until one wintry dawn forty-five years later, when a trembling, aged Eleanor bent over the lifeless body of her lover lulled to sleep in a snow-drift, no discordant note entered the sweet harmony of their lives. When shadows dimmed their pathway, they clung closer to each other. Even death could not separate them. When Freneau was under the sod and the world disputing over the few poor bay leaves it had allowed him, her mind was constantly with the lover of her youth. In her maidenhood she had watched weary years for him to come back to her, and at the last, when his voice was hushed in "the land of no returning," she longed to go to him.

THE CHEVALIER DE SILLY
AND HIS NEWPORT SALLY

THE CHEVALIER DE SILLY AND HIS NEWPORT SALLY

In the old portion of Newport, where the houses are compact and the streets hilly and narrow, is the Vernon mansion, erected many years before the Revolution, when the city ranked second only to Boston in commercial supremacy. William Vernon, its first owner, was one of the wealthy old-time traders whose fleet of merchantmen made the long wharf famous. There, in the days before British guns were trained on the city and stanch, opulent warehouses flanked the quays, his jolly tars would unload the cargoes of West Indian sugar and bring out of some brave ship's hold the half a hundred blacks. Most of those ship-loads of sugar would be made into rum and sent back to Africa or the Indies for more blacks; but the savages never saw their native homes again, and became the faithful Cudjos and Pompeys of many a colonial household.

Quaint Mary Lane, or Street, as it is now called, running past the Vernon residence, is truly a thoroughfare of memories. For a period of three years it was trodden by the feet of thousands of British soldiers, and later the gallant Frenchmen of Rochambeau's fleet of seven ships of the line and five frigates walked there disconsolately in groups of three or four, hoping soon to sail away from the poverty-stricken place Newport was at that period of its existence. No longer were there gentlemen of fortune like Colonel Godfrey Malbone, who so often clinked silver goblets with his guests over groaning tables, to give entertainments. The town was almost destitute of wealth, and but a small number of the better class of its population came back to their former dwellings during the French fleet's stay there.

Life in Newport during 1780 and 1781 was for the most part a dreary thing to these Frenchmen, but a host of dashing chevaliers fresh from the Court of "the Austrian," as spiteful Madame Adélaïde had nicknamed her fair niece, were sure to find some amusement even in the dullest city. It is true there was no "prince of youth," as the court ringleader, the Comte d'Artois, was dubbed by his intimates, to lead them through days of delight as at Versailles and Fontainebleau, but Newport gallants soon introduced them to town beauties, and cards were laid for the ever new and exciting game of love. In lieu of the cabriolet races in the Bois de Boulogne they could skate in the little creeks about the Point, and when dreams of the Palais Royal made them long for "Armid" and "Alcestio," there was always a dame to finger a spinet. Old citizens of the past generation used to tell of window-panes in the Vernon mansion covered with the names of Newport's femininity. With the same spirit which later led their compatriots to jest and dance amid the grim shadows of the Conceirgerie, they made the best of a changed life.

Mrs. Cowley's assembly-room, famous in Newport annals, was made over into a salon for play, and there the youth of the army would often stray when the periods of duty were over. We can see the haughty Rochambeau with his muff bending over the tric-trac table, while about him flutter the very flower of France,--men bearing such names as Marquis de Chastelleux, Marquis de Laval, Baron de Closen, Vicomte de Noailles, Marquis de Custine, Comte de Fersen, and Duc de Lauzun. They who had lost and won their louis to the laughter of the fairest women of a famous court had for sole spectators little village gamins peering in at the windows. Before the glitter of gold these graceful gamesters forgot time and place. They were back again at tables in the gardens of Paris,--recreation spots as lovely as Little Trianon, where Oberkirche wrote, "The glades were perfumed with lilacs and peopled with nightingales--The air full of fragrant mist brightened by butterflies." Off came their tinselled coats, and in their stead some of them donned frieze great-coats, while the more intrepid rolled thin soft linen shirt-sleeves up to the elbow for luck. To guard their eyes from the light and keep their powdered wigs in place, they tied on straw-crowned hats festooned with some forgotten charmer's colors. The Maybud plucked many moons before, which nestled so often 'neath a tassel, was faded. Cliff flowers were in full bloom then.

The belles of Newport! What pages could be devoted to them! A more enchanting galaxy of femininity never enriched a New England town. The Duc de Lauzun, an ardent spirit in our struggle for liberty who left his countrymen enthusiastic over republican ideas, the ladies even going so far as to have their hair dressed _aux insurgents_, wrote home from Newport of their charms. The Misses Hunter, daughters of Dr. William Hunter, he particularly admired. "I was not in love with them," he coyly confided, "but had they been my sisters I could not have loved them more."

Three famous beauties were Miss Champlin, who danced with stately Washington; Miss Redwood, to whose charms the sailors in the street would doff their caps, holding them low until she passed; and Sally Church, the sprightly maiden who, tradition says, tripped into the hearts of a small army of Frenchmen when she returned from Providence to her native city about the time of the French fleet's arrival.

Sally Church! how prim the pseudonym, and yet very vivacious was its owner. A charming vision in her red wool gown and huge fur tippet, we see her mincing merrily through that Mary Street on a blustering March morning. The wind blows her wide London hat and gives it a saucy tilt, and the eyes of a long line of soldiers follow the wave of her skirt as it plays about her trim ankles. "Here comes Sally in her chair," or "Here comes Sally on foot," were among the most interesting pieces of news her admirers had to impart. They ogled and sang to her, wrote poems on her beauty; and yet at most of them she only laughed, and so they ended by worshipping her.

As the months flew by there lay in one of the rooms of the Vernon mansion, which Rochambeau had made his head-quarters, a young lieutenant by the name of Chevalier de Silly, suffering from a disease protracted by the severe cold. Having heard his brother officers dilate on the charms of the lovely Sally, he desired that his bed be removed close to the window, in hope that he might obtain a glimpse of her. Many a weary hour he spent gazing out into the gray line of the street unrewarded, and then one happy day he espied her. The fates favored him, and Sally, chancing to look up at his window, smiled and thereby added another soldier to her own little army. Soon the Chevalier grew better and was able to assume the duties of his post. His friendship with Sally had progressed by this time and she was becoming the torment of his life,--an agony far worse than bodily illness. As he stood on duty--a grim sentinel--before the Vernon mansion, the maiden would happen to stroll by.

"Come, Silly," she would call, "take me for a walk to the old mill."

"I cannot, mademoiselle," was his usual sad answer; "the king's service goes before everything."

"You do not love me or you would take me," she always mocked, and with a proud toss of her head she would hasten past him, heedless of his torrent of reproaches.

And so "Silly and his Sally," as the youth and the maiden came to be dubbed by the garrison, spent their days. Tradition says that she was fonder of him than of any other of her French swains, but, womanlike, enjoyed the power of her fascinations. But she was not to keep him in her train forever. The springlike day dawned when General Washington, "the Atlas of America," Silly called him, was to arrive. At Barney's Ferry he landed in a gayly decorated barge, and all Newport was out to greet him. The troops formed a solid line three deep on either side from the long wharf to the very door of the Vernon mansion, where he was to be entertained by Rochambeau. The following night all Newport was illuminated, and old records say that the Town Council ordered candles to be purchased and given to all who were too poor to use them, so that every house should show a light. About the streets the hero rode, followed by the French officers, their aides, and hundreds of patriotic citizens bearing candle torches to make the occasion joyful. The night was clear, the sea calm, and the wind still. Those who participated in the affair never forgot the beauty of the scene. Sally was in the crowd, but there was no Silly by her side, for the disconsolate Chevalier wrote to a friend that, "after General Washington, she who attracted my attention was the amiable Sally Church accompanied, alas! by a faithful townsman who was free of a touch of the gout."

A few days later, when the gout departed, the Chevalier had his revenge on her other suitors at a ball given by the city of Newport to General Washington and Admiral Rochambeau, in Mrs. Cowley's assembly-room. There, to the rippling airs of Gluck, so beloved by musical little Marie Antoinette, he showed the company many of the famous Guimard steps, as he essayed the gavottes of his king. Sally would look at him often, admiration springing forth from her sparkling eyes, as he gracefully swayed to music, one moment gay and the next sinking into a gentle cadence. This is one of the last records we have of Sally and her Silly dancing out the swift-footed hours in the taper-lighted ballroom.

Numerous accounts of the ball have come down to us. The decorations were intrusted to Dezoteux, one of the aides of the Baron de Vioménil, and the guests are said to have been loud in the appreciation of his efforts. Washington opened the festivities by leading out Miss Champlin in a minuet. When midnight was near at hand and frolic and mirth at their highest pitch, the gallant Rochambeau and several of his officers led an assault on the startled musicians, and, seizing their instruments, played the tune, "A Successful Campaign,"--a graceful token of respect to the Commander-in-Chief of the army.

We picture them together when he homeward walks beside her chair, the constant lover, to her very gate. With the memory of the music in her ears, the stars overspreading the sky a dazzling canopy, and a cavalier by her side, could she ask for more? And yet she did, and, alack-a-day, as she herself would have said, the stream of her life was not always so fresh and frolicking. Could the chairmen tell us more? No doubt; but leave the door tight shut and spare a lady's blushes.

The day came when the Chevalier de Silly sailed away to Yorktown, and the maiden was left to work her witcheries on her townsmen. Newport was a changed place after the French departed. Many a true heart was exchanged that morning for a golden button or some other token. The mothers only were happy, and back to households came a troop of long-exiled femininity, free from the fret of love. Twelve years later, it is said, one summer dawn in Paris there rolled through the streets a tumbril on its way to a guillotine erected near the gardens of the Luxembourg. One of its occupants was De Silly. In the hush which always fell on the mob when a victim reached the last step of the stairway of death we wonder whether the fair face of Sally Church came before the eyes of her poor Chevalier. The answer is lost in the length of long-dead years. Over the cries of that surging mass of humanity when the blade snapped the thread of his life we see them once again living out their Newport romance.

SUSANNA ROWSON, OF
"CHARLOTTE TEMPLE" FAME,
AND HER BRITISH GRENADIER

SUSANNA ROWSON, OF "CHARLOTTE TEMPLE" FAME, AND HER BRITISH GRENADIER

Overlooking Nantasket's white beach, and guarded, as it were, by the little hills of Hull, is a dwelling, now entirely changed, where Susanna Haswell spent her girlhood. A quarter of a century ago it was still as the Haswells left it when they were forced to remove to the neighboring town of Hingham, practically prisoners of war. Then it was described as a large one-story wooden building with a huge chimney in the centre, one of a type to be found in hundreds of old New England villages. In the days when the English maiden conned her lessons as her father painted quaint stilted landscapes on the doors and mantel-pieces of his abode the house was approached through a line of fruit-trees, and close to the gray walls that the sea-mist loved to kiss grew the multitude of flowers that flourished in the sweet plots of the descendants of the Puritans.

Somehow it is with the garden of her early home that we associate the young Susanna. Tradition says that it was her especial care, and she helped the seeds her stepmother brought from Boston to perfect bloom and watched each season for her fairy children. There we know, in the autumn of 1768, when her last garden inmates were dying, she saw the British fleet of six men-of-war enter Nantasket Roads, little dreaming that they were to affect her life. Later in the day she helped her father receive some of the officers. It is easy to picture her, a simply garbed child, listening to the talk of the circle about the fireplace. How her eyes must have glistened at the tales of the theatres,--the sprightly new comedy "The Perplexities," which was put on at Covent Garden; "The English Merchant," with its witty prologue by Garrick. Then there was chatter of the new tea-gardens that were springing up everywhere on the skirts of London Town. Wonderful they seemed with their grottos of mystery and Chinese lanterns that rivalled the stars. The talk of war she would not listen to, and we see her leave the company to creep to the door and gaze out on the silent night. Very lonely her home looked in the darkness, and off in the distance she could hear the dull boom of the surf telling her that London Town was far away.

A strange child was this Susanna Haswell. When the "quality maids" of her day spent a large part of their time perusing the "Boston News Letter" for the latest falafals and fashions,--thinking only of fine brocades, the newest talematongues to make high their head-dresses, and the Sweet Royal Honey Water for their fair faces,--Susanna's mind was always with her few treasured books or dwelling on the pleasure she gave her father in their journeyings near their home. They would wander off over the nearby hills in search of the first wild fruits. Sometimes he would bring his box of colors and they would linger until nightfall in some spot that had caught his fancy.

At an early age she began to write verses, and all through her life kept up this pastime. Her whisperings to birds, flowers, and sea-shells helped to fill up her days. She was happy, we know, for "The Roses of Life," written at a later period, show a brave and intrepid spirit that feared neither isolation nor the daily trials allotted to mortals.

"Why should we complain of this life's dreary road,
Or the thorns or the thistles that in our path lay?
Has not heaven a portion of reason bestow'd,
To pass them o'er lightly or brush them away?
I'll gather life's roses wherever I find them,
And smile at their folly who dread to come near;
Who cast all its joys and its pleasures behind them,
Nor pluck the sweet buds, lest the thorns should appear."

The years flew by until after the battle of Bunker Hill, when most of the inhabitants of Nantasket left their farms and fled to Boston. It is recorded that the grain was left standing in the fields and that the Haswell family were eventually left the sole occupants of the place. Ex-Lieutenant Haswell was loyal to his king, and his house was a constant resort for the British naval and military commanders. Small skirmishes sometimes took place near the village, and one day, during an action in the vicinity, a wounded redcoat, a member of Major Tupper's brigade, was brought to the door on a stretcher by some of his comrades, with the request that he be given shelter. Into the southeast room the family had him carried and laid on the great four-poster. There Susanna tended him through the morning hours, bandaging his wounds with soft homespun and ministering to his wants. It was a never-to-be-forgotten day, often referred to in after-years, and it made a deep impression on the heart of the sensitive girl. Bending over him, she received his last confidences. He was Daniel Carnagon, twenty-six years old, the only son of a clergyman in the north of England. When his breath grew feebler her stepmother brought out the family Bible and read in a low voice words of comfort. Death came to him as he dreamed of his native heath and a happy boyhood. When the dusk began to fall Susanna helped her father dig a grave in the garden. There they laid him to rest with the last sunbeams staining his poor clay like a heavenly benediction. Some rose-bushes and an apple-tree covered his resting-place. The latter is still standing alone, a faithful watcher over dust neglected and forgotten. Little has been written of Susanna's grenadier, but we know that she who made the whole of her generation weep with "a tale of truth" wept over him in the twilight of a long-dead day.

When the Revolution was nearing its close the Haswell family removed from Massachusetts to Halifax, a favorite gathering-place for loyalists. Susanna was then nearing womanhood, and, owing to the low state of her father's pecuniary resources, she was forced to separate from dearly loved brothers and sail for England. There she obtained a situation as governess in a noble family, which she retained until her health failed. In 1786 she married Mr. William Rowson in London. This gentleman was then engaged in the hardware business and also acted as trumpeter in the Royal Horse-Guards. He was the son of an armorer to George III., and was noted for his personal beauty and accomplishments. It has been recorded that no one who heard could ever forget "the sublime and spirit-stirring tones" of his trumpet when he played for the Boston Handel and Haydn Society. When he trumpeted "The trumpet shall sound and the dead shall be raised" he thrilled his hearers into imagining the last hour was close at hand.

Shortly after entering the bonds of wedlock Mrs. Rowson published her first work, "Victoria," under the patronage of the Duchess of Devonshire, the famous Carlton House beauty known to history as the friend of Charles Fox. Among the subscribers are such names as Sarah Siddons, General John Burgoyne, Sir Charles Middleton, and our own Samuel Adams. The duchess seems to have conceived a warm attachment for her, and arranged that she should be presented to no less a personage than "Prince Florizel." Soon she found a place in the brilliant galaxy of ladies headed by "The Blue-Stocking Club," and in 1790, when "Charlotte Temple" was published, she became one of the leading literary lights of the day.

"Charlotte Temple" was the heart-toucher of her generation, and countless thousands sorrowed over her fate. Her story, as Mrs. Rowson gave it to the world, was the greatest success of the day, and it is said that more editions were printed of it than of any other novel written in the eighteenth century. About the life of the real heroine the years have woven a web some parts of which can never be unravelled. Tradition says that she was Charlotte Stanley, a young lady of great personal beauty and the daughter of a clergyman related to the Earl of Derby. Mrs. Rowson wrote of her that

"Her form was faultless, and her mind,
Untainted yet by art,
Was noble, just, humane, and kind,
And Virtue warm'd her heart.
But, ah! the cruel spoiler came."

Montreville, her lover, was in reality Colonel John Montrésor, an engineer in the service of the British army. His name is given as one of the managers of the famous Meschianza. It is said that he was a connection of the Haswell family, and it is a significant fact that the author's youngest brother, who distinguished himself in the war with Tripoli, bore his name.

The story on which Mrs. Rowson founded her romance was that Colonel Montrésor persuaded Miss Stanley to leave her boarding-school and elope with him to America at the opening of the Revolutionary War. She sailed in his companionship some time in the year 1774. On the same vessel was his brother, a fellow-engineer. Arriving at New York City, Montrésor secured a small cottage for her at Morrisania, a few miles distant from the city proper and near to the Boston post-road. The house she occupied--a primitive affair--is remembered as standing until 1850.

In the book we read,--

"Montreville gave her one female attendant and supplied her with what money she wanted; but business and pleasure so entirely occupied his time that he had but little to devote to the woman whom he had brought from all her connections and robbed of innocence. Sometimes, indeed, he would steal out at the close of evening and pass a few hours with her; and then so much was she attached to him that all her sorrows were forgotten while blessed with his society; she would enjoy a walk by moonlight, or sit by him in a little arbor at the bottom of the garden, and play on the harp, accompanying it with her plaintive, harmonious voice. But often, very often, did he promise to renew his visits, and, forgetful of his promise, leave her to mourn her disappointment. What painful hours of expectation would she pass! She would sit at a window which looked toward a field he used to cross, counting the minutes and straining her eyes to catch the first glimpse of his person, till, blinded with tears of disappointment, she would lean her head on her hands and give free vent to her sorrow; then, catching at some new hope, she would again renew her watchful position till the shades of evening enveloped every object in a dusky cloud."

From an old print]

In one of the old editions of the work there is a quaint picture of the neglected girl seated in a mournful attitude in a formal garden evidently much more pretentious than the primitive spot that the real heroine knew. The house in New York City generally accepted as the place where she died formerly stood at the corner of Pell and Doyer Streets and was known as the "Old Tree House." Her grave is in Trinity Church-yard; but even that is unauthenticated, some people having gone so far as to state that the head-stone that bears her name is a fiction. It is still the resort of the sentimental, and it is to be hoped that time cannot prove that Montrésor never sorrowed there over the girl Mrs. Rowson made famous as she herself did many years before on the grave of her British Grenadier.

THE GHOSTS OF AN OLD
STATEN ISLAND MANOR

THE GHOSTS OF AN OLD STATEN ISLAND MANOR

In the green old village of Tottenville, on Staten Island, there is still standing the antiquated Bentley manor-house, erected during the reign of Queen Anne. It is built of stone, and reposes on a high flowery slope overlooking the waters of Staten Island and the Raritan River. The walls are several feet thick and the gable roof is almost grotesquely high and steep, giving the building a very picturesque appearance. From its quaint little upper-story casements one can gaze over the Sound to St. Michael's Church at Perth Amboy with its quiet graveyard, where some of the Billops are sleeping. There they rest in peace, we hope; but, according to "Perth Towne" tradition, the fairest in life of that silent company is an unruly shade, and once a year during the first quarter of the spring-time moon comes back to her neglected garden to keep a tryst and a vow.

Christopher Billop, the first owner of the house, played a very interesting minor part in American history. When the Duke of York conveyed New Jersey to Lord Berkeley Carteret, a question arose as to whether Staten Island was included in the grant. To settle a discussion which threatened to assume grave proportions, it was decided that all islands in the harbor should belong to New York if they could be circumnavigated in twenty-four hours. Christopher Billop, who owned a little vessel called the "Bentley," sailed around Staten Island in that time, and the duke gave him the tract of land, on part of which the house is built, for his services.

This first Christopher Billop died very long ago. His only daughter married a Thomas Farmar, who changed his name to Billop, thereby acquiring the estate. It is with the son of this couple that the tales of the old house deal. The Billop family, like most of the islanders, were loyalists, and during the Revolution sided with their king. When the war broke out the second Christopher, a man of decided views and morose temperament, was reigning over the plantation. Many years before 1775 he had married a beautiful island belle by the name of Seaman and taken her home to his dreary house. An interesting tradition says of her that the month before she married she was courted by three lovers: the Englishman she married, a Huguenot, and a descendant of the pious Waldeneses.

The nuptial coach which bore her away did not bring her to the road of happiness, for the love between the husband and wife was never what it should have been. Her parents had sent her to a gilded cage. Soon her lord and master began to neglect her for his horses and dogs or his field work, and she was left alone in her great rooms to sigh and weep for the happy times she knew in her girlhood before Fate bound her an unwilling prisoner. The fine brocades and taffetas which formed her wedding portion no longer delighted her, for there was seldom any one but her sullen husband or the black women to gaze upon them. In vain she implored him to receive her friends, but he would not gratify her. Life ran smoothly enough for his liking, and he needed neither fiddles nor the flutter of fashion to enhance his happiness. Often on clear nights she would gaze from her chamber window on the lights in the castles over the water. How brightly they shone! and in her imagination seemed to beckon her. Then to her mind would come a flood of memories. She would see herself in Love Grove, dancing on the green of a fair day, with all the populace of the little capital assembled to behold the frolics of the quality. Now the Governor gives her a garland of flowers, for she is queen of a spring-time revel. In the ballroom of Edinborough Castle, the home of the Johnstone family, she flits. Over the memoried voices of violins would come the picture of a score of cavaliers bending low to the belle from a sister isle, and often the face of a boy would haunt her,--a boy more dashing and gayer than all the others. They were in the lantern-hung Watson garden the night the nephew of the old Scotch painter gave a fête when his penurious uncle was away at Woodbridge, and youthful Amboy entered into the frolic with zest. It was a sweet revenge for past injuries to feast on the miser's hoard. When a raid on the wine-cellar was planned, she stayed on alone with him in the garden. The laughter in his mocking eyes died away; he was urging her to fly with him to England. Beyond the wall of green which shut away the cliff a merchantman was anchored, and on board her were his travelling chests, for he was sailing back to his father's home on the morrow. He loved her, and would she go with him? Out into the tangle of green he led her down to the road overlooking the river. The night was very still, and through the sweet-scented darkness fresh with the breath of June they wandered hand in hand. Suddenly before their eyes spread the line of the town and beyond lay the sea of molten silver. Just below them the dark ship rested in a shadowy pool. She could not sail away with him to an unknown land. Fear overcame her love, and later in the night she tearfully wished him God-speed on his journey, and for a time he was forgotten.

The river before her would become a dream-river bearing her away through the portals of the past. The commonplace fabric of her days was forgotten. She was like one of those rare flowers that give their greatest beauty to the night. Without her visions life would have been a maddening monotone; and so she went about the duties of a colonial wife.

The early portion of 1776 was a poor thing full of dreariness to Mrs. Billop. She was leaving her girlhood far behind in her walk with Time. Each year was a repetition of the one past. The plantation of one thousand five hundred acres was a little world of its own, and she rarely went beyond its gates. Most of her working hours she spent in her garden, and under her fostering care it became a spot of loveliness. In the circles of roses flanked by humbler flowers and the tall line of lilies that crept like a stately band of pure-souled fairy sentinels down to the riverside she planted some of her own fragrant heart. Sometimes her garden was to her like an only child, and then, again, the relationship was changed, and the garden was the tender mother and she herself the weary thing that sought peace there on a breast of green. But one day a wonderful thing happened. Awakened by the sunlight gilding the narrow panes of her bedroom windows, she heard shouts in the barley-field. "Dey am coming! dey am coming!" the household slaves were calling in merry voices. Mrs. Billop, drawing her curtains, saw in the path leading to the house a body of scarlet-coated cavaliers mounted on mettlesome steeds. It came to her mind that a horseman had dashed over from Richmond a week before, telling of General Howe's arrival. These horsemen must be some of his officers making a tour of the island, she thought. For the first time in many years gentlemen were coming to stop at the manor. A smile crept over her face as she gazed upon them, and then she softly let down the curtain.

When the day had advanced another hour by the sundial outside the boxwood grotto a vision stood on the landing at the top of the stairs and spread out the panniers of a long-unused gown. The hall below was filled with the badinage of masculine voices, and the surly Christopher, forced into playing the host, seemed to be performing the part with no poor grace. Black women in India print dresses were passing bowls of summer punch, and from the kitchen came the pungent scents of limes and the redolence of roasting corn.

From her vantage-point the wife viewed it all, and then began slowly to descend. As the rustle of the brocade became louder and the odor of attar of roses more perceptible, the noise stopped all of a sudden, and every eye was focussed on the woman garbed as if going to a Franklin ball. Little they knew that she was wearing her wedding attire that had lain folded many years in her mother's cedar chest brought from home.

High towered her hair of the brown-red color of autumn leaves, and rouge and black lustre helped bring out the charms of her face. White as the white-thorn bush in the garden was her sweeping brocade, and on her arm a love-knot caught a tiny Bambini fan.

"Good-morning, sirs," she called, in a voice that charmed all the company, as they bowed low, save her husband, who gazed at her with astonishment and rage. But she did not heed his angry looks. Before her at the foot of the stairs there stood a gallant youth by the name of Harry Fairleigh. He alone held her eyes. Where had she seen that strong face tanned by the ocean wind? In an instant she knew. He was the embodiment of a dream--her boy lover grown older--the cherished girlhood vision of her true mate. The Revolution had brought him to America again and Fate led him to her very doorstep. Something seemed to be swaying her. She caught his eyes and read in them that he knew her. As he came forward to kiss her hand, she seemed filled with an awful joy,--a feeling that tortured and hurt as it swept over her,--for she knew that he had come too late.

The islanders welcomed the British gladly. Soon General Howe's brother arrived with an additional force of twenty thousand men, and General Clinton, repulsed at Charleston, hurried north with a re-enforcement of three thousand more, making the combined forces somewhere near thirty-three thousand. At the Rose and Crown Tavern near New Dorp, the Black-Horse at Richmond, the Ship near Prince's Bridge, and in farmhouses from end to end of the island hundreds of the soldiers had their quarters. In that month of July the interest of the colonists was centred on Staten Island. Every Tory maid who dreamt of scarlet coats and golden epaulets thought with envy of those fortunate fair ones surrounded by such multitudes of would-be admirers. Many a modern household descended from loyalist settlers retains tokens of that gala period. Now it is a chair that some visiting genius made when off duty, perhaps a paste buckle, or a miniature which witnessed some story woven in a summer month before the wheels of the Revolution began to move swiftly.

No longer could Mrs. Billop complain of lacking company. Her husband, under the influence of his foreign guests, was becoming a changed man, and the fame of his hospitality was known even in New York. All through the war there was a constant stream of visitors. Among the famous ones could be mentioned Major André, General Knyphausen, Sir Henry Clinton, and General Robertson. Many times Fairleigh would ride over from Richmond to take part in some festivity. His manly beauty always made him a noted figure, and his admirers called him the English Apollo. Billop, by some strange intuition, seemed to hate him, and longed to forbid him the house. One night his rage obtained mastery over his prudence, and he rushed into his garden, where a dance was in progress, and demanded that he stop his minuet with Mrs. Billop and leave the company. Those were days of hot words and flashing steel, and soon the moon shone on the glint of crossing swords. The wife, terrified that harm should come to the young soldier on her account, threw herself between the combatants, and, in the face of her husband's threats, it is said that she promised to dance with Fairleigh again at some future time. But she reckoned not with war. Soon the drum and fife notes sounded in every part of the island, and the gallant young soldier marched away with his regiment, carrying what was left of the heart of the beautiful Mrs. Billop.

On the bloody field of Monmouth Fairleigh fell in the thick of the fight, and Mrs. Billop's promise was never to be fulfilled in life. Evil days fell upon the Bentley manor. Christopher Billop was dragged away to Burlington to languish chained to the jail floor, if we are to believe Elias Boudinot's stern order to the keeper of the jail, written in November, 1779. In one of the rooms General Howe met the peace envoys after the disastrous battle of Long Island, and later the Billops were forced to flee, as the property was declared confiscated by the new government.

Years afterwards, when the house was in the hands of aliens, the story goes that one of the new-comers was startled on a July night by the appearance of two ghostly figures that seemed to come out of the boxwood grotto and dance a stately minuet along the garden paths. Every year, it is said, they still come back. When the trees are in their fullest foliage and the earth carpeted with flowers, the shades of the unhappy wife and the laughing-eyed soldier she could have loved haunt the neglected garden, and with only a sighing wind for music, they bow and sway through the tangled paths until the morning stains the dreary faces of the decaying castles across the water.

MAJOR ANDRÉ'S LAST LOVE

MAJOR ANDRÉ'S LAST LOVE

At the foot of Broadway, New York City, there is a little plot of grass, surrounded by a rusted iron railing, which is a part of the one-time Bowling Green. In old Knickerbocker days and up to the time of the Revolutionary War it played an important part in the history of the Colony. When the British occupied the city it was often used as a romping-ground by the neighborhood's Tory children and the waifs of the alley-ways.

There in the summer of 1779 a happy-faced youth with sparkling dark eyes and hair lightly powdered would sometimes be seen sketching a group of frolicsome urchins as they rolled their hoops or played games among the bushes. He was Major John André, then acting as an aide-de-camp to General Clinton and living at his head-quarters.

One bright May day after the capture of Stony Point, when sweet airs were stealing over from the fragrant wilderness Paulus Hook, and the road Broadway was like a glittering golden ribbon drawn through a world of summer time, Major André loitered near his favorite seat on the greensward. Toying with his pencil, he glanced up to see a chair pass by on its way up from Whitehall. By its side walked three cavaliers dressed in the height of fashion and looking as if they might have just stepped out of Court Alley. Its window-panels were down to let in the air, and as it rounded the green the young soldier from his point of view caught a glimpse of one of the fairest faces he had viewed during his American career. Soft brown hair rolled high above eyes of the same shade and a complexion as beautiful as the apple-blossoms of old Derbyshire.

Who the maiden was he longed to inquire, but no one was by, and in an instant the chair had passed. His eyes followed it, and as it turned in its triumphal course into one of the upper streets he saw a white hand rest for an instant above the door and wave the end of a fichu. All day long the memory of the lovely face and the waving fichu stayed with him.

Looking out of a window of Sir Henry Clinton's drawing-room at nightfall, he saw the same chair on its homeward way, followed by another. Then he learned from some of his brother officers that the vision of the morning was Sally Townsend, a belle of Long Island.

General Sir Henry Clinton was then occupying the mansion No. 1 Broadway. It was a spacious house with a garden extending to the river. Only a portion of his time was spent there, for when the weather grew extremely warm he departed with his household for the Beekman mansion at Turtle Bay. In the garden of the former place, one of the noted pleasure-spots in the city, Major André is said to have composed his poem "The Cow Chase." These quaint verses would perhaps be forgotten to-day if the one who penned them had not been immortalized by calamity.

Although the British officers made New York a theatre of amusement in which the candles never flickered or died out for a space of many months, the dashing André could not have found it as agreeable a spot as Philadelphia. In that city he planned the famous Meschianza in honor of jovial Sir William Howe, and was acclaimed the hero of the hour. Fame to him seems to have been an instinctive passion, and although of a family humbler than most of those of his scarlet-coated compatriots, he rose like a meteor above the shackles of environment and became the favorite of his regiment. It is small wonder that a youth who could correspond with the learned Anna Seward, as he did at the age of eighteen, should have hated his work in the mercantile shop of old Warnford Court. Looking back over the years to-day, he appears to us a paragon. That the "Cher Jean" of that humble home circle at Litchfield should be described by all his faithful biographers in most glowing colors is singular proof that he could not have fallen far short of their eulogiums. Of unusual personal beauty, a poet, artist, linguist, and musician, he lives for us again the handsome limner the belle of Long Island waved to on an early summer's day.

The love-affairs of Major André have always created as much discussion as the justice of his lamented fate. Whether he was true to that paragon of virtues, Honora Sneyd, as has often been written, or forgot her for Peggy Chew, Rebecca Redman, or any of the host of colonial beauties whose names have been linked with his, can never be answered. This we know, that after she was married to another, "the endless Mr. Edgeworth," André still wore her miniature, and he himself tells us that he secreted it in his mouth when taken a prisoner at Quebec. His affection for her was pure and lofty, and in his sprightly and characteristic letters to Anna Seward, her foster-sister, who corresponded with him under the pseudonym of "Julia," we obtain glimpses of a hopeless passion; of a lover who truly loved and longed, but was never an accepted suitor. In the fall-time of 1769 he writes to "Julia" from the midst of the implements of "quill-driving" in the London establishment:

"Instead of figuring a merchant as a middle-aged man, with a bob wig, a rough beard, in snuff-colored clothes, grasping a guinea in his red hand, I conceive a comely young man, with a tolerable pigtail, wielding a pen with all the noble fierceness of the Duke of Marlborough brandishing a truncheon upon a sign-post, surrounded with types and emblems, and canopied with cornucopias that disembogue their stores upon his head; Mercuries reclin'd upon bales of goods; Genii playing with pens, ink, and paper, while in perspective his gorgeous vessels launched on the bosom of the silver Thames, are wafting to distant lands the produce of this commercial nation. Thus all the mercantile glories crowd on my fancy, emblazoned in the most effulgent coloring of an ardent imagination. Borne on her soaring pinions, I wing my flight to the time when Heaven shall have crowned my labors with success and opulence. I see sumptuous palaces rising to receive me; I see orphans, and widows, and painters, and fiddlers, and poets, and builders protected and encouraged; and when the fabrick is pretty nearly finished by my shattered pericranium, I cast my eyes around and find John André by a small coal fire in a gloomy compting house in Warnford Court, nothing so little as what he has been making himself, and in all probability never to be much more than he is at present. But, oh! my dear Honora! it is for thy sake only I wish wealth."