My acquaintance with the Captain's life, from the vantage of an
eye-witness and comrade, goes back to the time when all of us
concerned were children; to the very day, in truth, when Philip, a
pale and slender lad of eleven years, first set foot in New York, and
first set eye on Margaret Faringfield.
As I think of it, it seems but yesterday, and myself a boy again: but
it was, in fact, in the year 1763; and late in the afternoon of a
sunny Summer day. I remember well how thick and heavy the green leaves
hung upon the trees that thrust their branches out over the garden
walls and fences of our quiet street.
Tired from a day's play, or perchance lazy from the heat, I sprawled
upon the front step of our house, which was next the residence of the
Faringfields, in what was then called Queen Street. I believe the name
of that, as of many another in New York, has been changed since the
war, having savoured too much of royalty for republican taste.[1] The
Faringfield house, like the family, was one of the finest in New York;
and there were in that young city greater mansions than one would have
thought to find in a little colonial seaport--a rural-looking
provincial place, truly, which has been likened to a Dutch town almost
wholly transformed into the semblance of some secondary English town,
or into a tiny, far-off imitation of London. It lacked, of course, the
grand, gray churches, the palaces and historic places, that tell of
what a past has been London's; but it lacked, too, the begriming smoke
and fog that are too much of London's present.
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