for such sordid embarrassments; a disastrous ending to a long career of felicitous intimacy with women; a pitiful document to have filed on the very dayfor so it turned out-of his death..

CHAPTER IV

PORT RICHMOND

I

THERE had to be an end to it all some time, and the first warning had come already in 1830, at the age of seventy-four, when a stroke paralyzed the Colonel's right side. Friends gathered, a doctor was sent for to experiment with electrical treatment, and as soon as she heard the news, Mrs. Howes-Cousin Katecame from Brooklyn to the office at Gold and Fulton Streets in which he was then established. And he wanted to be taken to her home, but they said he was not in a condition to be moved, and sent her away. But the next day, the Reverend William Hague recorded, "a coach containing the Colonel and two strong men as attendants, who had arranged a mattress or pillows for his support, arrived at the dwelling of Mrs. Howes. He was cordially

welcomed.

A few weeks' assiduous care on

the part of Mr. and Mrs. Howes, encouraging him with their help to rise, and by gentle exercise in the parlor, to learn to walk again, repeating the process at a set hour daily for a month, restored the old

warrior so that he resumed his office business with as keen a zest as ever."

He went back to his affairs, and the following year he was trying to persuade Mrs. Howes, who was now living in Poughkeepsie, to come and keep house with him in a "large elegant three story house in Duane Street adjoining the Furnace, which is an inconvenience, for when the wind is eastwardly the smoke and ashes are an annoyance, and is probably the reason why the rent is so moderate-$550The house has 12 or 14 rooms. And two years later he was getting married.

But in October and November of 1833 he was ill again—in the midst of the fracas with Madame Burr --and a second stroke paralyzed his legs for a time. A few months later a third stroke crippled him. He came back from Jersey City, and went to live in the boarding house kept in the old Jay mansion, opposite the Bowling Green, by Mrs. Newton, a Scotch lady who took the greatest care of him, and every day gave him luxuries and champagne; for a while he insisted on receiving clients in his office, reclining on a sofa; but his strength was gone, his handwriting was terribly cramped, the old warrior had made his last fight. There was nothing to do now but wait.

And the days passed pleasantly. He had a little money, and a colored servant to look after him; he had his books, of which he once said that "if I had read Sterne more, and Voltaire less, I should have known that the world was wide enough for Hamilton and me;" Mrs. Newton was very kind; friends came and sat with him—John Vanderlyn, Charles O'Conor, Matthew Davis who was to inherit his papers,

his cousin, Judge Ogden Edwards of Staten Island, the faithful Swartwouts. They sat there in his room, and talked of old times..

2

But another move was necessary, for in the summer of 1836 they were getting ready to tear down the old Jay mansion, and Judge Edwards decided that it would be best to have the Colonel near him on Staten Island. So they packed him up, and put him on the little steam ferry, and took him over to Port Richmond, to Daniel Winant's Inn.

He was extremely weak now; toothless, and uncertain of his eyes; and so thin, just a little wisp of a man, tremulous and mumbly. They put him on the ferry, and perhaps he knew that he would never see New York again; perhaps along the dear, accustomed streets, in the windows of the little red brick houses, or at the columned threshold of those familiar doorways, he beheld a smiling vision of vanished faces, a friendly pageant of companionable figures gathered in kindly courtesy to speed his passage; perhaps there came to him in those last moments the echoes of all the busy years, the sound of forgotten voices calling to him in farewell above the tumult of the bustling wharves. Perhaps he understood that he must always be remembered, that legend must thenceforth adorn his name with a greater mystery than even he had fostered, and that the future must inevitably render him the homage of a fascinated interest, the justice, possibly, of a belated sympathy.

Or perhaps he was beyond regrets and hopes; perhaps his gaze fell wearily upon the disenchanted