on this occasion was followed by his being packed off to Virginia to play at superintending his father’s tobacco plantations.  Neglecting this business to go shooting on the frontier, he got a Scotch Presbyterian mountaineer’s daughter into trouble; and when he turned up again at the door in Queen Street, he was still shaky with recollections of the mob of riflemen that had chased him out of Virginia.  That piece of sport cost his father a pretty penny, and resulted in a place being got for Ned with a merchant who was Mr. Faringfield’s correspondent in the Barbadoes.  So to the tropics the young gentleman was shipped, with sighs of relief at his embarkation, and—­I have no doubt—­with unuttered prayers that he might not show his face in Queen Street for a long time to come.  Already he had got the name, in the family, of “the bad shilling,” for his always coming back unlooked for.

How different was his younger brother!—­no longer “little Tom” (though of but middle height and slim build), but always gay-hearted, affectionate, innocent, and a gentleman.  He was a handsome lad, without and within—­yes, “lad” I must call him, for, though he came to manly years, he always seemed a boy to me.  He followed in our steps, in his time, through Mr. Cornelius’s school, and into King’s College, too, but the coming of the war cut short his studies there.

It must have been in the year 1772—­I remember Margaret spoke of her being seventeen years old, in which case I was nineteen—­when I got (and speedily forgot) my first glimpse of Margaret’s inmost mind.  We were at the play—­for New York had had a playhouse ever since Mr. Hallam had brought thither his company, with whom the great Garrick had first appeared in London.  I cannot recall what the piece was that night; but I know it must have been a decent one, or Margaret would not have been allowed to see it; and that it purported to set forth true scenes of fashionable life in London.  At one side of Margaret her mother sat, at the other was myself, and I think I was that time their only escort.

“What a fright!” said Margaret in my ear, as one of the actresses came upon the stage with an affected gait, and a look of thinking herself mighty fine and irresistible. “’Tis a slander, this.”

“Of whom?” I asked.

“Of the fine ladies these poor things pretend to represent.”

“How do you know?” I retorted, for I was somewhat taken with the actresses, and thought to avenge them by bringing her down a peg or two.  “Have you seen so much of London fine ladies?”

“No, poor me!” she said sorrowfully, without a bit of anger, so that I was softened in a trice.  “But the ladies of New York, even, are no such tawdry make-believes as this.—­Heaven knows, I would give ten years of life for a sight of the fine world of London!”

She was looking so divine at that moment, that I could not but whisper: 

“You would see nothing finer there than yourself.”