"Thanks, Tom," she said, wearily, as he relieved her of the heavy burden. "Colonel Montgomery is to be at the Broadway corner for me. He is going to Englishtown, and has promised to see me home. The Paulus Hook coach passes at seven, you know."
Beside the lyre-shaped hat-rack Ellen paused for a moment. Thomas thought that she was going to faint, but she beckoned for him to go on. Before her was Nathaniel's gray beaver, the one she had liked him in so much. She remembered he wore it that happy day they wandered down to Gansevoort Street to look at their little dream-house. Dear dream-house, that would never be theirs. The wistaria vine that twined so lovingly about the stoop-rail high up to the dormer window would never purple for them. Was he asleep now? She wondered what he would think of her running off in this fashion. "Perhaps it is foolish, but I could never stand seeing him again," she murmured to herself. On the floor were his riding-gloves, swept off the hat-rack by some heedless reveller of the night before. Like one lingering in a dream, she picked them up and tenderly put them in the pocket of her coat. For a moment she stood silent with her hand on the door in the attitude of one listening to a benediction. Outside a soughing wind was sweeping through the deserted street and the dark hall was full of its whispered sighs. Softly she opened the door on the new day, and then, as if speaking to an invisible presence, she said, "May you sometimes think of me as I shall always think of you, dear heart." And the sweetest part of the story is, he was faithful to her memory until death.
A True Picture of the
Last Days of Aaron Burr
A True Picture of the Last Days of Aaron Burr
AN old house that has fallen to ruin always has something pathetic about it, but a great hostelry in the clutches of decay, where warmth and cheer have welcomed generations of travellers, is sadder still. In Port Richmond, Staten Island, there is still standing the Richmond Inn, suffering from the weight of many years. Erected before the war of 1812, until 1820 it was the home of the Mersereau family, who owned most of the surrounding land when the place bore the name of Mersereau's Ferry. The Mersereaus were Huguenots, and descended from two brothers who fled with their mother from France to America on the revocation of the Edict of Nantes. The Richmond Inn rests on the site of an earlier Mersereau mansion,—a witness of the Revolution. During the early part of the last century there were no buildings to shut off the view of the water-front, and its lawn ran down to a bluff overlooking the ferry landing and wharf. There Jed Simonson, a soldier who had fought at Monmouth, received the freight from the Jersey shore and the chance scow bearing Indian luxuries purchased from the hold of some newly-arrived merchantman. Great trees stood guard at the back of the inn like a troop of shadowy sentinels, and through them came sweet scents of the verdant country that rolled away over the British breastworks still covering the nearby hills. On the wide galleries of this haven of rest old sea-captains could always be seen gently dozing as they puffed long pipes in the sunlight, or perchance gazing through spy-glasses at the white sails flecking the harbor. The ocean underwent quick transitions as they rounded Cape Hatteras or struck the Gulf Stream, and the nautical yarns they spun of the "Merry Marys," "Saucy Belles," and "Swift Sallys" were ropes which led to the seamen's true Elysium.