He had definite ideas upon certain subjects still, and was doughty in their defence. For example, during this visit to his daughter, he sat one evening in the chimney-corner, apparently dozing, while a party of young people were discussing the increasing facilities of travel by steam, and contrasting them with the slow methods of their fathers. The Major drowsed on, head sunken into his military stock, eyes closed, and jaw drooping—the impersonation of senile decay—when somebody spoke of a trip up the Hudson to West Point the preceding summer.
The veteran raised himself as if he had been shaken by the shoulder.
“That is not true!” he said, doggedly.
“But, Major,” returned the surprised narrator, “I did go! There is a regular line of steamers up the river.”
The old war-horse reared his head and beat the floor with an angry heel.
“I say it is not true! It could not be true! General Washington had a big chain stretched across the river after Arnold tried to sell West Point, so that no vessel could get up to the fort. And, sir!” bringing his cane down upon the hearth with a resounding thump, his voice clear and resonant, “there is not that man upon earth who would dare take down that chain. Why, sir, General Washington put it there!”
A fragment of the mighty chain, forged in the mountains of New Jersey, lies upon the parade-ground at West Point.
Forty years thereafter I laid a caressing hand upon a huge link of the displaced boom, and told the anecdote to my twelve-year-old boy, adding, as if the stubborn loyalist had said it in my ear,
“And there it stands until this day,
To witness if I lie.”