The worthy Commissary died, it is believed, at about the time that trouble started.  On April 13th, in the memorable year 1776, General Washington made “the Hill” his headquarters, and the house built by the British army official was the scene of some of the most stirring conferences that marked the beginning of the Revolution.

At the vitally important officers’ councils held behind those tall, white columns, there was one man so unusual, so brilliant, so incomprehensible, that a certain baffling interest if not actual romance attaches itself automatically to the bare utterance or inscription of his name,—­Aaron Burr.  He was aide-de-camp to General Putnam, and already had a vivid record behind him.  It was during Washington’s occupancy of Richmond Hill that Burr grew to love the place which was later to be his own home.

I confess to a very definite weakness for Aaron Burr.  Few hopeless romanticists escape it.  Dramatically speaking, he is one of the most striking figures in American history, and I imagine that I have not been the first dreamer of dreams and writer of books who has haunted the scenes of his flesh-and-blood activity in the secret, half-shamefaced hope of one day happening upon his ghost!

From the day of his graduation from college at sixteen, he somehow contrived to win the attention of everyone whom he came near.  He still wins it.  We love to read of his frantic rush to the colours, guardian or no guardian; of the steel in him which lifted him from a bed of fever to join the Canadian expedition; of his daring exploits of espionage disguised as a French Catholic priest; of a hundred and one similar incidents in a life history which, as we read it, is far too strange not to be true.

Spectacular he was from his birth, and even today his name upon a page is enough to set up a whole theatre in our imaginations.  Just one incident comes to me at this moment.  It is so closely associated with the region with which this book is concerned, that I cannot but set it down in passing.

The story runs that it was a mistake in an order which sent General Knox of Silliman’s Brigade to a small fort one mile from town (that is, about Grand Street), known as “Bunker’s Hill”—­not to be confounded with the other and more famous “Bunker”!  It happened to be a singularly unfortunate position.  There was neither food nor water in proper quantities, and the munitions were almost non-existent.  The enemy was on the island.

Whether Major Burr, of Putnam’s division, was sent under some regular authority, or whether he characteristically had taken the matter into his own hands, the histories I have read do not tell.  But they do tell of his galloping up, breathless on a lathered horse, making the little force understand the danger of their position, pleading with his inimitable eloquence and advancing the reasons for their retreat at once.  The men were stubborn; they did not want to retreat.  But he talked.  He proved that the English could take the scrap of a fort in four hours; he exhorted and urged, and at last he won.  They said they would follow him.  From that moment he took charge, and led them along the Greenwich Road through the woods, skirting the swamps, fording the rivers, to Harlem, to safety and to eventual victory.