At this period many were the visits to Judge Jay's Westchester home at Bedford. The house, part of wood and part of stone, had a spacious, comfortable piazza along its front. The interior had more of cheerfulness than of elegance, but a great air of abundance, and was a peaceful shelter for the waning days of that eminent statesman and patriot. Of this household Cooper wrote later: "I scarcely remember to have mingled with any family where there was a more happy union of quiet decorum and high courtesy
than I met with beneath the roof of Mr. Jay." To no place more fitting than his wistaria-covered library could Cooper have gone for patriotic inspiration. The venerable Judge, as he smoked his long clay pipe, used to delight in telling anecdotes of the Revolution, "the truth of which," he said, "never had been and never would be written."
One summer afternoon, while sitting on his broad piazza under the lindens, Cooper, with others, listened to the Judge's recital of the story of a spy's great struggles and unselfish loyalty while serving his country in the American Revolution, and the story gave Cooper an idea for his "Harvey Birch." The fact that strolling
peddlers, staff in hand and pack on back, were common visitors then at country houses, became another aid. "It was after such a visit of a Yankee peddler of the old sort, to the cottage at Angevine, that Harvey's lot in life was decided—he was to be a spy and a peddler." It was something to the author's after regret that he drew the dignity of George Washington into the "Harper" of this story.
"The entire country between the Americans on the skirts of the Highlands and the British on Manhattan—or 'the Neutral Ground'—suffered more in harried skirmishes, pillage, violence, fire, and the taking of life itself, than any of its extent during this strife." Scarsdale and Mamaroneck were in this region, with White