“Listen,” said S. K. I did, and then, in a loud voice, he said: “By King George’s beaten rascals, I’ve forgot the serviettes!”
And I seemed to see the waiter say this and hear him clatter toward a high dresser which held the linens. . . . S. K. told me about how they set the table, and he told me the date of this dinner, which was July 10, 1790. And then I had a list of the guests, who were President Washington’s Cabinet “and Ladies”: John and Abigail Adams, the Vice-President and his wife; Thomas Jefferson, the Secretary of State; Henry Knox, Secretary of War, and his wife; and Alexander Hamilton, Secretary of the Treasury, and his wife.
“I am glad to see Alexander Hamilton,” said S. K., squinting in the room (we pretended, of course, that their ghosts were back a-dining), “for he has done so much for America. He it was who saw that the United States must have a central power and central Government. (My, how the individual States did disagree after the war, how their trade restrictions did hamper and hurt the bigger trades and the good of the country!) He it was who got up the Constitution; and Mr. Jefferson, who sits across the table, the Declaration of Independence. Pretty nice things both of them, you know!”
I agreed.
“President Washington is speaking,” said S. K. “He has just told the servant to be lighter on his heavy-soled shoes (this in an aside), and then, as a good host, quickly diverts attention by mentioning a recollection. . . . ‘To think,’ he says, ‘that in September, 1776, I watched from this point the burning of the city of New York. It was an awesome and most fearful sight!’ (He pauses; I think he gives thanks that all the horrors of war are past.)
“ ‘And how many houses were burned, if it pleases you to make reply to a foolish woman’s question?’ This from Mrs. Knox. President Washington says that it pleases him ‘most mightily’ to answer whatsoever question Mrs. Knox may ask him, and replies that one thousand houses went in that terrible affair, and that that number was a fourth of the city’s mansions.
“ ‘So vast a place,’ says Mrs. Hamilton. ‘I am wellnigh distracted when I wander the crowded streets, thinking I may never return from whence I started!’ ‘We are growing,’ says Thomas Jefferson. ‘Our United States population is nearing three million nine hundred thousand, and New York now boasts high of its last census, which states that thirty-three thousand live within its confines.’ ”
I laughed, and S. K. smiled.
“To think of it,” I said, and then asked what New York’s population is now, and S. K. told me that in 1910 it was four million seven hundred and sixty-six thousand, and that New York State held over nine million souls.
Then S. K. told me that Hamilton was buried in Trinity Churchyard, and that Trinity Church was caught in the big fire, and rebuilt twice since, but that St. Paul’s had been saved. He told me he’d take me to both places some day.