The carriage rolled across a brief wooden bridge above a merry water.
“That’s old Bronck his river,” he told her. “And these hills were the stronghold that Washington fell back to after the British drove him out of the White Plains. Ignorant old General Howe had ordered his navy to sail up the Bronx, and when the ships could not even find the little creek, Howe feared to advance any further. He sneaked away to capture Fort Washington by treachery.
“Our tulip trees won the praise of Washington while the great man was here. Perhaps that very tree is the son of one of those that shed its blossoms on his tent. Tulip trees are hard to persuade; they won’t grow where you plant them. But this one came to live here of its own accord when my father built this house for my mother.
“Strange, isn’t it, my darling, that they should have come out here—in 1805, it was—to escape from another pestilence? It was the yellow fever then. It had been breaking out every few years before, but that year it was frightful, and my mother was a bride then just as you are now.
“They went back to New York because she grew lonely, but they came out again with the next fever summer. I was born here. Ten years ago I came out for a while. That was another yellow fever year. Even you remember that far back, don’t you?”
“Oh, yes, Mist’ RoBards. That was when they moved the Post Office, the Customs House, the banks, the newspapers, the churches—even my father’s store, out to Greenwich Village. But we went back in the late fall. When shall we go back now?”
“God knows!” he groaned. “I should be glad to stay here with you forever.”
“It’s lonely, though—a little, don’t you think, Mist’ RoBards?”
“Not with you. We’d best forget New York. It’s a doomed city now.”
“Oh, don’t say that!”