[Illustration:  JUDGE JOHN JAY.]

[Illustration:  BEDFORD HOUSE.]

[Illustration:  BEDFORD HOUSE LIBRARY.]

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.

[Illustration:  HARVEY BIRCH’S CAVE.]

“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 Plains close by.  Fort Washington was on a near height, and Dobb’s Ferry a few miles off.  “The Coopers’ daily drive from Angevine discovered a pretty thicket, some swampy land, and a cave in which to hide the loyal, to be fed by friendly hands at night until escape was possible.  There were also at hand the gloomy horrors of a haunted wood where gliding ghosts fought midnight battles”—­all of this the farmers knew and could tell of, too.  One of them, “Uncle John,” lived just below the home hill in a wee cot of four walls, each of a different color—­red, yellow, brown, and white.  He frequently came up the Angevine-home hill to tell, between his apples, nuts, and glasses of cider, tales of what he, too, knew, to a good listener,—­the master of the house.  Then there was “Major Brom B., a hero of the great war, with his twenty-seven martial spirits, all uniformed in silver gray, his negro Bonny and his gun, ‘the Bucanneer,’ had not its fellow on the continent.”  These were all aids, and sources of unfailing interest about the many Westchester chimney firesides of that day.  In his “Literary Haunts and Homes,” Dr. Theodore F. Wolfe tells of a fine, old-time home, beyond the valley below Cooper’s Angevine farm, where he placed many an exciting scene of this coming tale.  In 1899 Dr. Wolfe notes the house as changed, only by a piazza across its front, from the days when Cooper knew it well, and that it was pleasantly shaded by many of the fine, tall trees that gave it the name of “The Locusts,” which it kept in his story as the home of the Whartons.  The descendants of the family he used to visit still live there, and one of them showed Dr. Wolfe all that was left of “The Four Corners,” Betty Flanigan’s hotel, whence Harvey Birch, Cooper’s