His honestly heroic qualities are his passport.  He cannot seem smug, nor colourless, nor over-prosperous:  he is too vivid and too vigorous.  His childish vanity is nobly discounted by his childlike simplicity in facing big issues.  The blue and gold which he wore so magnificently can never to us be the mere trappings of rank:  they carry on them the shadows of battle smoke, and the rust of enviable wounds.  Let us take his memory then gladly, and with true homage, rejoicing that its record of happiness appears as stainless as its history of honour, and well satisfied to find one picture in which something of the sunshine of high gallantry seems caught, and for all time.

Dr. Johnson wrote thirty lines of eulogy of him, with the nicety and distinction of phrase which one would expect.  Perhaps the simple ending of it is most impressive of all; so let us make it our own for the occasion: 

"...  But the ALMIGHTY,
Whom alone he feared, and whose gracious protection
He had often experienced,
Was pleased to remove him from a place of Honour,
To an eternity of happiness,
On the 29th day of July, 1752,
In the 49th year of his age."

CHAPTER IV

The Story of Richmond Hill

If my days of fancy and romance were not past, I could find
here an ample field for indulgence!—­ABIGAIL ADAMS,
writing from Richmond Hill House, in 1783.

I had left dear St. John’s,—­for this time my pilgrim feet were turned a bit northward to a shrine of romance rather than religion.  I meandered along Canal, and traversed Congress Street.  Congress, by the bye, is about two yards long; do you happen to know it?

In a few moments, I was standing in a sort of trance at that particular point of Manhattan marked by the junction of Charlton and Varick streets and the end of Macdougal, about two hundred feet north of Spring.  And there was nothing at all about the scenic setting, you would surely have said, to send anyone into any kind of a trance.

On one side of me was an open fruit stall; on another, a butcher’s shop; the Cafe Gorizia (with windows flagrant with pink confectionery), and the two regulation and indispensable saloons to make up the four corners.

In a sentimentally reminiscent mood, I took out a notebook, to write down something of my impressions and fancies.  But there was a general murmur of war-inflamed suspicion, and I desisted and fled.  How was I to tell them that there, where I stood, in that very citified and very nearly squalid environment (it was raining that day too), I could yet see, quite distinctly, the shadowy outlines of the one-time glorious House of Richmond Hill?

They were high gates and ornate, one understands.  I visualised them over and against the dull and dingy modern buildings.  Somewhere near here where I was standing, the great drive-way had curved in between the tall, fretted iron posts, to that lovely wooded mound which was the last and most southern of the big Zantberg Range, and seemingly of a rare and rich soil.  The Zantberg, you remember, started rather far out in the country,—­somewhere about Clinton Place and Broadway,—­and ran south and west as far as Varick and Van Dam streets.