Weymer Jay Mills

“ The three eldest Knickerbocker daughters clung to her as if she were the guiding light of their starved souls.
Suddenly she left them, and went to her brother.
"I am glad they came, Jonathan," she faltered; "we had forgotten God made us all in His own image. He gave us the flowers and the stars, the sweet winds and the spring-times—the voices of children and the songs of birds. Every man is rich if he but knew it, and those who are only rich in pride are the poorest of the race." ”

“ 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. ”

“ Peace had fallen upon the earth, and in Lady Tyron's mouldering parlor the vials of a foolish pride were despoiled forever. Through the mystical light the living of the family seemed to be strangely transfigured. Jonathan Knickerbocker, the autocrat of York, walked with his head bowed upon his breast. The hard lineaments of Georgina's face were softened. Ofttimes she turned uneasily, half expecting some awful apparition to emerge before her. As for Miss Julie, she moved like one in a dreamland of her own. ”

“ 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 [127] 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. ”

“ And Major Macpherson didn't know why, Tol, de diddle, dol, dol; But Major Macpherson soon found out, Tol, de diddle, dol, dol; 'Twas all for Miss Lavinia Scout, Tol, de diddle, dol, dol.
The night was creeping on, clear and cold, and there would be full settles about his waggish fires. In the sky, puffs of fleecy clouds were hurrying away like sheep eager to reach the fold of mother-dusk. Off in the west, where twilight parted her curtains, glowed faint streaks of yellow and rose color, promises of daffodil meadows and flower-strewn lands to come. ”

“ 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. ”

“ At the very moment when she had glanced back tremblingly for a parting benediction from the stars, a figure wrapped in a great-coat [Pg 96] was hurrying out of the Sheridan garden. It was Patricia's lover. The youth often came to gaze at her home after sleep locked all the doors of the world but the dream door for which he had never yet found a key. Then the daytime's barriers were broken and she was his alone. Under the Knickerbocker elm-trees he would stand, sometimes, a wild, impassioned troubadour, aflame with songs of love for his imprisoned mate. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The door of the tavern had no more than swung to when that of Snograss House opened. Every inmate of the room eyed Miss Georgina as she greeted the mistress. There was an element of hostility in their ceremonious handshake. As the sister of the autocrat of York viewed the rich furnishings of the apartment, the gold-legged piano and the silk-covered furniture, her lips straightened into a sinister line. Her own possessions [Pg 71] shrunk into insignificance compared with this elegance. Even the long shut-up state parlor in Knickerbocker Mansion could hardly vie with it. ”

“ 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 [155] closer to each other. Even death could not separate them. ”

“ Juma, from his discreet distance, heard her compared to the magnolia worn on the lapel of the coat she admired so much. In her white and fragrant young womanhood she was like it from sheer inaccessibility. The flower expressed her character and position—Patricia Knickerbocker, a daughter of the [Pg 26] autocrat of York. When he mentioned her father's name the girl shivered. An invisible wall seemed to rise between them. Then the feeling died away. Her soul grew wider awake each moment her lover gazed at her. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 [142] 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. ”

“ A great red brick mansion in Chambers Street, guarded by two sentinel-like elm-trees and a tall iron fence; a sidewalk filled with the fashionables of Gotham starting for the afternoon Battery promenade; and up behind the eye-like panes of one of the haughty, staring windows a maiden dreaming over her pen. There is the picture. A demure little country Phyllis, visiting her august city relatives for the first time, has found herself in two strange worlds—fashion and love. In the extract taken from her letter written to a home confidante is the key to a forgotten romance of old New York. Love! ”

“ The wild, sweet-scented flower grew in but one spot near the town—an island in the centre of the Woodbridge Swamp, where Captain Kidd in a freak of fancy had planted it over the body of a comrade, tradition said, and no one ever disputed the story. To reach it, even the most sure-footed ran [Pg 23] the danger of being caught in the bog.
Patricia wondered as she mounted the stairs how her lover had been able to come with her gift unseen. The watching negro smiled sadly and shook his head when the last bit of her garment disappeared over the staircase like a white moth moving treeward. ”

“ AN OLD VIEW OF STATEN ISLAND, ABOUT 1830
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. ”

“ The famous Judge Josiah Knickerbocker was my father, and my brother Jonathan owns Knickerbocker Mansion, the finest dwelling in York."
No potentate ever wore a crown more blissfully than Miss Georgina. Tall, beak-nosed, gruff-voiced she was, always with her younger sister, Miss Julie, in tow and under good control—Miss Julie, who smirked and copied her when family pride was concerned, though she had her own misgivings and opinions on other matters. ”

“ 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. ”