Fruit of a jealous heart;
From lonely widowhood,
Oh! bear me to my Spouse.
ONE HUNDRED YEARS AGO.
It was the December of 1775. The British colonies in America were agitated with wild excitement. News had been received of the unsuccessful attack on Quebec by the Continental troops under Montgomery and Arnold, and of the fall of the brave Montgomery.
The friends of the colonial cause had set great hopes on the success of this enterprise, which would give them the command of the St. Lawrence, and deprive the British of a most important arsenal for their permanent supply of troops and munitions of war. They were grieved and desponding over the disastrous result, while the loyalists, rejoicing at the check thus given to the progress of the rebellion, looked confidently for its speedy close, the restoration of the royal governments, and the return of the several provincial governors who had discreetly abdicated at the first outbreak, and retired to safer quarters. No doubt their enthusiastic public demonstrations of joy assisted in fanning to a
flame the smouldering elements of resistance among the colonists, who, exasperated at the persistently oppressive measures devised and forced upon them by the mother country, were even beginning to utter whispers of an entire disruption, and a formal assertion of rights, in a declaration of independence.
Near a pleasant village in the northern part of New Jersey there stood—and may be standing yet, for the builders of those days had an eye to permanency in the solid structures they reared—a farmhouse of spacious dimensions, built in the favorite gambrel-roofed style then customary in country dwellings. Mr. Foote, the owner of the mansion, and of many broad acres around it, was a fine specimen of a country gentleman after the old English pattern. Bigoted in his attachment to everything English, he clung tenaciously to all the customs and traditions which his father, in transplanting them to American soil, had cultivated with
an ardor all the more vehement for the difficulty of assimilating them to an order of things so entirely different from that in which they had formerly existed. These traditional treasures he had bequeathed to his children as a sacred legacy of far more value than the paltry lands, tenements, and appurtenances they would inherit from him, and so his son continued religiously to regard them.