Then, in an instant, the Hill of today vanishes.  The show windows of the great shops, gorgeous with display, the vast hotels, the clubs, the fluttering Starry Banners and Tricolours and Union Jacks, the stirring posters that bring the heart into the throat and send the hand down into the pocket for Liberty Loan or Red Cross, the line of creeping motor-cars on the asphalt, the swarming sidewalks, swim away in a mist, and in their place there is rolling woodland, and a silver stream, and in the distance, a great white house.  The years drop away.  A boy of eight, curled up in a big chair, is dipping for the first time into the pages of his country’s history.  His face is flushed, his eyes are bright.  With that vividness that belongs to impressionable childhood, and to no other period of life he is seeing bits of the past that he will never forget.  To the end of his days the rhetorical phrases will ring in his ears and the letters forming them will dance before his eyes.

Boston Common.  The line of defiant Minute Men drawn up.  The curt order, “Disperse, ye Rebels!” and the volley that followed so closely upon the words. This was the first blood shed in the American Revolution. The morning of an impending battle:  the Continental leader exhorting his men. “There are the Red Coats!  We must beat them today, or Molly Stork’s a widow!” Again, the boy is being awakened from sleep in his bed in a quiet street of eighteenth-century Philadelphia.  The voice of the watchman is crying the hour and the thrilling tidings. “Two o’clock in the morning!  All’s well, and Cornwallis has surrendered!”

Here, on the Murray Hill of May, 1918, the man becomes the boy once more.  Perhaps the suggestion comes from one of the women’s faces that are looking straight at him, beseechingly and rebukingly, from the posters that line the Avenue; the face of “The Greatest Mother in the World,” or that younger face beyond which the eye perceives dim outlines of marching men in khaki.  The veil with the Red Cross is transformed into a coiffure of powdered hair, crowning the countenance and figure of a grande dame of the eighteenth century.  She is standing before the doorway of a great country house, smiling and beckoning welcome, and at the invitation officers on horseback halt the column of rapidly moving men.  The soldiers break ranks and throw themselves down in the shade of the trees.  The officers advance bowing, and enter the house.  The lady is smiling.

The hostess with the powdered hair is Mrs. Mary Lindley Murray, wife of Robert Murray, British sympathizer and Quaker, and mother of Lindley Murray, the grammarian of later days; the house is the Murray Homestead, or the Manor of Incleberg, that in Revoluntionary times stood in the neighbourhood of what is now Park Avenue and Thirty-seventh Street; the Red Coats whose march westward she has interrupted are the troops of Lord Howe, in close pursuit of the badly demoralized soldiers of General Washington; the day is one of September, 1776.