“It is but truth to say that the manor for generations was the domain of potentates who had more personal prerogative and power within their limit than are possessed by any civilized ruler of the present time. The condition of their numerous tenants was little better than that of serfs: the latter's freedom, fortunes, and, on occasion, lives were at the mercy and disposal of their lord and master; and if the venerable manorhall, the old horse-chestnut-tree that stands near it, and the stream that in other years came plunging without check over its rocky bed, — if all these, like the Greek sculptor's marble maid, could of a sudden become endowed with the gift of tongues and tell us of the past of which they were witnesses, we should have revealed to us the vastness of the difference between the feudalism of those days, perhaps more merciful but surely not less potent than that of William the Conqueror, and the widespread and safely-guarded freedom of to-day.”

This is not a fanciful sketch, nor does it have reference to a remote era and another country. It is copied from the history of the county of Westchester, and is a careful, truth-loving man's final summing up of the conditions existing a brief century and a quarter ago on the wide-reaching estates of the lord of the manor of Philipsburg, by no means, it may be added, the wealthiest or most powerful of the patroons, who then divided between them the ownership and almost absolute rule of the fairest portion of the British province of New York.

The patroons went out with the Revolution. The alien system of which they were the exemplars was wholly opposed to the love of liberty and the strenuous demand for equality which lay behind that great conflict, and a generation sufficed to work the almost complete extinction of their power and privileges. In passing, however, they left behind them some splendid reminders of their sway, and a visit to these mute survivals of another era gives a clearer idea of colonial New York than could be obtained in any other way.

When it was ended I rejoiced, and with reason, that a recent pilgrimage to the land of the patroons had its beginning in Albany, for the quiet old capital town is the centre of the most important portion of the Dutch settlements along the Hudson River among which the patroon system had its birth in America. When Hendrik Hudson first explored the stream that bears his name he was unable to sail the “Half Moon” as far as Albany, but five of his sailors made their way by boat to the future site of that city. This was in 1609, and five years later the place was settled by the establishment there of a trading post of the United Netherlands Company, the site selected being an island just below the present city. The venture resulting in a profitable fur trade with the Mohicans, in 1623, a stockade was built on the mainland, which, in honor of the Prince of the Netherlands, was called Fort Orange.

Colonists were now sent over from Holland, and, in 1629, the patroon system of that country was introduced on the Hudson, Killian Van Rensselaer, a wealthy pearl merchant of Amsterdam, prominent in the Dutch West India Company, being given a patroonship by the States-General which extended from the mouth of the Mohawk to Baerren Island, below Albany. This grant, called Rensselaerwyck, was made by successive enlargements to stretch twenty-four miles back from the river on each side, so that it finally covered a surface forty-eight by twenty-four miles in extent. To this lordly domain the patroon held absolute title, with feudal rights and privileges that made the lot of the colonists an irksome one. The patroonship was inherited by his son Johannes, and descended by entail through five generations, when laws were enacted barring further succession. General Stephen Van Rensselaer, the last patroon, died in 1839, and his son Stephen, sixth of the line, in 1868, at the age of eighty years.

The first settlement in the patroon's domain early became a centre of the fur trade, and a town grew up around Fort Orange, the name of which was changed, in 1964, to Albany. As the burghers increased in numbers they began to take leases of the adjacent lands from the patroon, to whom they agreed to pay fixed rentals. Following the American Revolution Stephen Van Rensselaer adopted the policy of leasing farms in perpetuity upon the nominal consideration for eight years of “a pepper-corn a year,” at the end of which time the leases drew a rent estimated to be the interest at six per cent. on the value of the land at about five dollars an acre, payable in the production of the soil and in personal service. When he died, the entail being abolished, he divided the manor between his two sons, Stephen getting the lands on the west and William those on the cast bank of the Hudson.

The old patroon had been an indulgent landlord, but following his death the tenants became anxious about a clause in their leases which gave the owner the right to claim one-fourth of the proceeds whenever a farm passed by purchase, and proposed the buying of all reservations, so that they would be released from the rentals and become holders in fee. This offer was declined by the Rensselaers, and there ensued one of the bitterest political conflicts ever known in American politics, — the anti-rent war. The counsel employed by the tenants to devise methods of relief advised that the landlord's right was absolute, but suggested that, while there was no legal remedy, it might be well to make the collections of rentals so difficult that the landlord would be willing to agree to a compromise. The tenants, it was pointed out, by banding together and giving each other notice of the approach of bailiffs, could make the service of process most difficult; and to this advice, in 1840, William H. Seward, then a candidate for re-election as governor of New York, added the recommendation that the “anti-renters” should organize and send to the Legislature men who would hold the balance of power between the great parties, and thus force the passage of laws relieving them.

Thus began the conflicts that convulsed New York politics and excited the State from one end to the other. Not only was a political party formed, but also other organizations which, masked as Indians, attacked the law officers, once at least with fatal results. The other manors of the State were equally excited, and the outbreaks continued until, in 1845, Silas Wright, the then governor of New York, issued a proclamation declaring Delaware County in a state of insurrection. The “anti-renters” made short work of Wright. In the following year they defeated him and elected their own candidate for governor, John Young, who promptly pardoned everybody who had been imprisoned for anti-rent crimes. The dispute found its way into the Legislature and finally into the courts. Tired of the controversy, the Van Rensselaers in the end sold all their rights to Colonel Church, who, sustained in his position by legal decisions, pursued a compromising policy which gradually quieted the agitation. He has released the rentals and given a fee-simple title, so that now three-fourths of the manor is free from rental.

Albany cherishes at least one interesting memento of the Van Rensselaers, who, true sons of the race from which they sprang, were fond of their pipes and their schnapps, downright, sturdy men, each and all of them firm friends, good haters, and stout fighters, for at the northern end of Broadway, in grounds extending down to the Hudson, stands an ancient mansion, commonly called the “Patroon's,” erected by him in 1765 and until recently occupied by his descendants, — a broad building, with a porch and wide central hall, upon the walls of which hangs paper of curious yet elaborate design, specially brought out from Holland.

More interesting still is the parroon's other residence at Greenbush, on the opposite side of the Hudson. The Greenbush house is most curiously planned. All of the rooms connect with each other, usually by means of closets, but as there are varying levels on the same story, the doors in some cases open several feet above the level of the floor of the lower room. There is no apparent reason for this difference of level, unless it was purposely designed to lessen the chances of capture should the house be taken by an enemy, — a supposition rendered probable by the exceeding thickness of the walls, still pierced by two of the nine loopholes which once commanded the approaches. In this house General Abercrombie had his headquarters while marching to attack Fort Ticonderoga, in 1758, and it was at the cantonment to the east of it that Schuckburgh, the army surgeon, composed the famous song “Yankee Doodle.”

The first mayor of Albany was Peter Schuyler, an able and ambitious man, who sought for many years to become the owner of an estate rivalling in size and value that of the lord of Rensselaerwyck. He succeeded, and, dying, left a manor of many thousand acres to his grandnephew and heir, Philip Schuyler, destined later to play so worthy a part in the history of the Revolutionary era. At the head of Schuyler Street, in the southern part of Albany, still stands the house long occupied by Schuyler and his wife, a daughter of the house of Rensselaer. This was the town residence of the Schuyler family. A mansion at Schuylerville, which, with the general's mills, was burned by Burgoyne in 1777, was their country-seat.

The house stands on a high eminence, and in its early days was beautified by a wide stretch of lawn gently sloping towards the river. It is built entirely of brick, two stories high, with gabled roof and dormer-windows and fronted by a huge octagonal vestibule, very like the pilot-house of a river steamboat. Massive doors with heavy brass lock and chain give entrance into a hall of great length, lighted by high windows, one on each side of the vestibule. Opening into this hall on either hand are spacious parlors with wooden cornices, high mantel-pieces, and wide, deep fireplaces. The wainscot of each room is as high as a tall man's head, and the windows, set deep into the wall, reach almost from floor to ceiling.

From the rear of the hall a broad, winding stairway leads to the second floor, in the railing of which there is still faintly visible a scar made by the tomahawk of an Indian. Sight of this scar recalls an unusual and stirring story. In the summer of 1781 a band of Tories and Indians, secreted in the woods near the house, watched long for a favorable opportunity to capture General Schuyler and carry him off to Canada as a prisoner. Schuyler, however, was on his guard against a movement of the kind, and when, one afternoon, he was told that a stranger wished to see him, he seized his fire-arms and hastily gathered his family about him in an upper room. Here it was discovered that the youngest child, an infant, had been left below asleep in its cradle, whereupon the general's third daughter, afterwards the wife of Stephen Van Rensselaer, rushed downstairs, caught up the child, and started back through the hall, just as the Indians and Tories rushed in through the servants' quarters in the rear. The foremost savage, catching a glimpse of the flying girl, hurled his tomahawk at her head, which barely missing her, struck the railing at the foot of the stairs. The Tory leader, believing her one of the servants, called out to know where her master was, when, with signal presence of mind, she called back that he had gone to alarm the town. Schuyler, leaning from an open window, fired his pistol in the air and shouted to imaginary friends, “Come on, my brave boys, and we've got them!” whereupon the intruders beat a hasty retreat.

From the spacious upper windows of the Schuyler House a far-reaching view may be had of the hill-flanked Hudson, while directly beneath lies the city, and idling there one is tempted, in fancy at least, to scan the strange, shadowy panorama of whose slow unfolding this old mansion has been the silent witness. Forts, on either hand, protect the quaint Dutch town, while English officers and men and sturdy provincials crowd the narrow streets. Abercrombie and Howe are leading an army of seven thousand regulars and nine thousand provincials against Montcalm and his treacherous Indian allies in the North; while in the South, a young Virginian colonel, Washington by name, is, under Braddock, laying the foundation of a great career. Then, after a brief interval of peace, comes the struggle for independence. Albany has become a rendezvous for the patriot forces pressing northward, and its streets are again filled with soldiery. Finally Burgoyne is routed at Saratoga, and he with Baron Reidesel and his other officers are on their way here to be entertained by Schuyler with such marked kindness and attention that the British commander was led to express his deep regret at having burned his host's mills and country-seat at Schuylerville. “That, general,” said Schuyler, “is but the fortune of war,” an answer which prompted the Briton to always speak of the American as one of the noblest men he had ever met. Nor was this praise undeserved, for Schuyler was a man whose influence ever kept pace with his activity. Washington and Lafayette were among those who gave him their confidence and honored his home with their presence. Here, too, in 1780, Alexander Hamilton was married to Schuyler's daughter, Elizabeth, the gifted and gracious woman whom Burr's animosity was to (loom a few years later to a long and desolate widowhood. The Schuyler mansion is now part of the estate of the late Mrs. Fillmore, who was the Widow McIntosh, and lived here until her marriage with the ex-President, which took place in the house.

In the years when old Peter Schuyler was building up the fortune which he bequeathed to his son he took into his employ a young Scot, named Robert Livingston, to whom in time he gave his daughter Alida in marriage. Livingston had ability and the Scotchman's knack for getting on in the world. Before he was twenty-two he was “secretary of Albany.” A little later he began to purchase desirable lands along the Hudson from the Indians, acquiring property so rapidly that at the age of thirty-two he had become an influential proprietor, his estate being erected into the manor and lordship of Livingston with attendant privileges by a grant from Governor Dongan, of New York, subsequently confirmed by a royal charter from George I. The manor consisted of nearly a hundred and fifty thousand acres, and embraced large parts of what are now the counties of Dutchess and Columbia.

But the first Livingston did more than build up a great fortune. He was the founder, also, of a race of patriots and men of affairs. His son Philip, second lord of the manor, was a merchant in New York, a brilliant social figure and a member of both the Provincial Assembly and the Council. Philip's eldest son, Robert, third lord of the manor, took small part in public affairs, but his three brothers were all men of repute and power. Peter was a great merchant in New York and president of the first Provincial Congress; Philip, his father's namesake, signed the Declaration of Independence, served in the Continental Congress, and was one of the founders of King's College, now Columbia University; while the fourth brother, William, was governor of New Jersey during the Revolution.

The first lord of the manor, while leaving the bulk of his estate to his eldest son, bequeathed some thirteen thousand acres, called the Lower Manor, or Clermont, to his second son, Robert, a man of unusual attainments. Robert R., son of the second Robert, served as a provincial judge, sat in the “Stamp Act” Congress, and was a leading member of the Committee of One Hundred elected in 1775 to take general control of public affairs, while his son and namesake was the ablest of all the Livingstons. A lawyer by profession, the second Robert R. was one of the Committee of Five charged with drafting the Declaration of Independence, helped to frame the first constitution of the State of New York, and was its first chancellor, in that capacity administering the oath of office when Washington was inaugurated President of the United States. Later he accepted the mission to France, where he won the warm friendship of Napoleon, and did much to secure the cession of Louisiana to the United States. While in Paris he became interested in the application of steam-power to navigation, and, following his return home, was associated with Robert Fulton in the building and launching of the first steamboat, the “Clermont,” on the Hudson River. Edward Livingston, a younger brother of the chancellor, served as United States district attorney, mayor of New York, and federal senator from Louisiana. He was Secretary of State under Jackson, and the Nullification Proclamation of 1832 is supposed to have been written by him.

The daughters of the house of Livingston were not less remarkable than its sons. All of them had beauty and the power to fascinate men, and not a few displayed an independence and daring in their love-affairs that lend piquancy to the family annals. Sarah Van Brugh Livingston, daughter of New Jersey's patriotic and poetical war governor, became the wife of John Jay, first chief-justice of the United States. The chancellor had four sisters, all of whom made noteworthy marriages. Gertrude became the wife of Morgan Lewis, the classmate of Jay and Hamilton and for many years chief-justice of New York. John Armstrong, the husband of Charlotte, was a soldier in the Revolution, twice senator from New York, minister to France, Secretary of War during the second conflict with England, — being, with the sole exception of Stanton, the strongest and ablest man who has ever held that office, — and, in 1816, Monroe's most formidable rival for the Presidency. Spirited Kate Livingston, in striking contrast to the unions made by her sisters, fell in love with and wedded Freeborn Garretson, a wandering Methodist evangelist, who, being accepted on equal terms by his wife's family, built a church at Rhinebeck, of which he remained the pastor until his death.

Janet Livingston, the chancellor's other sister, gave her hand and heart to Richard Montgomery, the gallant Irishman, who, when lie fell at Quebec, at the early age of thirty-eight, stood second only to Washington in the affection of the Revolutionary leaders. One's eyes fill with tears as one reads the story of Montgomery and his bride. He had been a captain in the British army and had met Janet Livingston while on his way to serve under Wolfe at Louisburg. When, a few years later, lie returned to settle in America, he renewed his acquaintance with and married her. There still exists the quaintly worded letter in which he asked her father's consent to the union. “Finding,” he writes, “that you have already had intimation of my desire to be honored with your daughter's hand, and apprehensive lest my silence should bear an unfavorable construction, I have ventured at last to request, sir, that you will consent to a union which to me has the most promising appearance of happiness, from the lady's uncommon merit and amiable worth. Nor will it be an inconsiderable addition to be favored by such respectable characters with the title of son, should I be so fortunate as to deserve it. And if to contribute to the happiness of a beloved daughter can claim any share with tender parents, I hope hereafter to have some title to your esteem.”

“We approve of your proposal, and heartily wish that your union may yield you all the happiness you seem to expect,” was the father's answer, and so they were married in July, 1773. Following his marriage, Montgomery settled at Rhinebeck, where he built a mill and laid the foundation of a house. Then the coming of the Revolution broke in upon his quiet and domestic happiness He was one of the first brigadier-generals created by Congress, which, a little later, detailed him as one of the leaders of the expedition against Quebec. He was reluctant to leave his home, but his heart was in the movement for independence. “My honor is engaged,” he told his wife, “and you shall never blush for your Montgomery.” And so they parted, he to die at the gates of Quebec and she to survive in lonely widowhood for more than fifty years.

Montgomery was buried within the walls of Quebec with the honors of war, but, in 1818, his remains, at public request, were disinterred and brought down the Hudson for reburial in New York City. Word was sent to the widow that the boat containing her husband's dust would arrive opposite her house at a certain time, so that she could be ready to look down from the portico and see what was forever beyond her wish. “At length,” she wrote in a letter to her niece, “they came by with all that remained of a beloved husband, who left me in the bloom of manhood, a perfect being. Alas! how did he return! However gratifying to my heart, yet to my feelings every pang I felt was renewed. The pomp with which it was conducted added to my woe. When the steamboat passed with slow and solemn movement, stopping before my house, the troops under arms, the Dead March from the muffled drum, the mournful music, the splendid coffin canopied with crape and crowned by plumes, you may conceive my anguish; I cannot describe it.” The flood of memories rushing upon the aged woman's brain caused her to fall upon the ground, and there, when the cortege had passed, they found her lying as insensible as her husband's relics.

The ghost of Robert Fulton, like that of Montgomery, haunts the manor and lordship of Livingston, drawn into Time's rapids and translated by the years into the rainbow of the cataract. Three years after the close of the Revolution, at the age of twenty-one, Fulton went to London and became a pupil of Benjamin West. In England he met the Duke of Bridgewater, who had made the first important modern canal, and was looking for a method of navigating it by steam. The problem at once took strong hold of Fulton's broad mind, and, like Morse in after-years, he abandoned painting for mechanics. The friendship and coöperation of Chancellor Livingston made his lot an easier one than that of the ordinary inventor, and it was at Clermont, his patron's country-place, that he gave the finishing touches to the designs for the first steamboat.

The society enjoyed by Fulton had refined and accentuated his natural beauty and manliness, and ere he had been long at Clermont he found an easy way into the affections of pretty Miss Harriet, daughter of Walter Livingston. “Is it too presumptuous in me to aspire to the hand of your niece?” he one day asked her uncle, the chancellor.

“By no means,” was the reply. “Her father may object because you are an humble and poor inventor, and the family may object, but if Harriet doesn't object, and she seems to have a world of good sense, go ahead, and my best wishes and blessings go with you.”

Harriet's father and family did not object, and the young couple were married at Clermont in the early summer of 1806. Nine years later the husband died. His first steamboat sank from the weight of its boiler, and he excitedly worked twenty-four hours without food, after which he was never well. He used the whole night in bed to think out inventions; his lungs became weak, and he had cough and chest pains. At Trenton cold fell upon his lungs, yet at Jersey City he stopped for three hours to look at his boats under repairs, and then rescued from drowning a friend who had fallen through the ice into the river. Sick for some days, he ventured to Jersey City again in foul weather to see a steam frigate he was building, and that killed him. Fulton died on February 4, 1815, and is buried in Trinity church-yard, New York. Neither monument nor slab nor inscription of any kind tells where his body lies, but his name stands first on the ever-swelling roll of American inventors.

A ride through Livingston manor, best begun at the little railroad station of Tivoli, gives the clue to the physical and mental greatness of the family from which it takes its name. Rudolph of Hafsburg neither by the Alps nor the Danube breathed purer air or saw such charming blue upon mountain and flood as fills these high vales of the middle Hudson, and the beautiful manor, rolling down through two counties, has residences here and there which a monarch might love to inhabit. Two miles from Tivoli is Clermont, the house in which for six generations have dwelt the lords of the manor, and adjoining it on the south is Idele, the spacious mansion built by Chancellor Livingston just after the Revolution, while close at hand are Rokeby, John Armstrong's old home; Wildercroft, long the residence of the Garretsons; Grassmere, the mansion Montgomery built for others to occupy, and Montgomery Place, overlooking the Hudson at Red Hook, where his wife spent the long years of her widowhood. Bancroft was right when he ranked the Livingstons as one of the most powerful families in New York at the time of the Revolution.

In the century following the coming of Killian Van Rensselaer to Fort Orange scores of patroons, both Dutch and English, secured from their Indian owners large domains on one side or the other of the Hudson, but only two of these approached in size and value the holdings of the Van Rensselaers, the Schuylers, and the Livingstons; these were the lords of Van Cortlandt manor and of the manor of Philipsburg. At the head of a narrowing bay, near where the Croton empties into the Hudson, stands the quaint old mansion occupied for more than a hundred years by the masters of Van Cortlandt manor and still the home of some of their descendants. Few American houses have had a longer history or one better worth recalling. It was built by Stephanus Van Cortlandt, a descendant of a younger branch of the ducal house of Courland in Russia, and the first native of the colony to hold the office of mayor of New York. In 1677 he made his first purchase of land north of the Croton River, and his possessions, when a few years afterwards he was made a lord of the manor by Governor Dongan, numbered eighty-six thousand acres, extending nearly ten miles along the Hudson, and inland twenty miles to the Connecticut line. The manor-house, completed in 1681, was at first more of a fort than a residence, for at that period both French and Indians threatened trouble, and the lord of the manor had chiefly in mind a safe refuge for his tenants in case of an attack. The stout stone walls, three feet in thickness, were pierced with loopholes for musketry, commanding every means of approach from the surrounding forest. One of these loopholes is still shown in the dining-room; the others were filled up when the fort became a dwelling.

Otherwise the old house has changed but little since John Van Cortlandt, second lord of the manor, enlarged it to its present dimensions in the early days of Queen Anne's reign. Some of the massive tables, curiously carved sideboards, high-post bedsteads, and straight-backed chairs that came from Holland during the lifetime of the first owner, are still in use, and the furnishing of all the rooms bespeaks an honest pride in the heirlooms of an ancient family. These include interesting mementos of the family from whom and the country from which the Van Cortlandts came, — the Dukes of Courland in Russia; ancestral portraits in oil, by the best painters of the day; in the dining-room is a half-length of Brant, the Indian chief, with his red sash and a string of wampum twined around the frame, and over the main entrance to the house hangs the great war bow of Croton, the sachem whose name has been given to the Kitchewan River and Bay.

When the war for independence was kindling Governor Tryon attempted to win over to the side of the royalists Pierre Van Cortlandt, third lord of the manor. With his wife and his secretary, Fanning, he paid a visit to the manor-house, and discreetly hinted to its master that honors and more broad acres awaited him when he should espouse the cause of the king. The polite, yet negative, reply given to the tempter made Tryon say to Fanning, “Come, we'll return; I find nothing can be effected here.” Pierre Van Cortlandt cast his lot with the colonists, and his son was a patriotic soldier in the Revolutionary army. The ferry-house on the manor frequently sheltered the Continental soldiers, and during the early days of the struggle Washington, Franklin, Lafayette, Baron Steuben, De Rochambeau, and the Duke de Lauzun were guests at the manor-house and gathered in friendly converse on the broad veranda from which, in more peaceful times, Whitefield and Asbury preached to immense audiences.

When Washington's army retreated southward, Van Cortlandt removed his family and household goods to Rhinebeck for safety; and in their absence Skinners and Cowboys occupied the premises in turn, pitching coppers against the oaken baseboards and tearing the pretty Dutch tiles from the fireplaces for use as plates. Perhaps a relic of those stormy, vanished days is an invisible ghost, which it is said occasionally passes through a certain room at midnight. Nature holds the key, and will not unlock the secret; nor will she disclose the origin of the sound of heavy footsteps in the great hall sometimes heard in the still watches of the night. The old house, however, is habited in the day by the most gentle spirits. Its present owner is James Stevenson Van Cortlandt, who lives there with his widowed mother and a sister, and their courtesy and hospitality to the stranger make one of the pleasantest memories to bring back from a visit to the land of the patroons.

When, “in good old colony times,” the lord of Van Cortlandt manor set out for the city, his home during the winter months, his way, after he had crossed the Croton, lay through the lands of one man, — Frederick Philipse, master of the manor of Philipsburg, which extended from Spuyten Duyvil Creek to the Croton, and from the Hudson to the Bronx. The Philipse family came originally from Bohemia, where they were followers of John Huss. Persecuted for their reform tendencies, they left Bohemia. Frederick Philipse, who was born in Friesland, came to America while still a young man, and, soon after his arrival, began to purchase large tracts of land from the Indians. How he paid for them is shown by records still in existence. Dry goods, kitchen utensils, guns, powder, tobacco, and rum were legal tender in those days, and were given in exchange for the eighty square miles of land constituting the estate, which by royal letters patent issued June 12, 1693, was erected into the manor and lordship of Philipsburg.

The first building erected by Philipse on his estate is yet standing at the mouth of Pocantico Creek, just north of the village of Tarrytown, and close at hand is the little church which he built, in 1699, to commemorate his marriage to Catherine Van Cortlandt. The Pocantico house, a strong stone structure, had portholes for cannon and musketry, and was called Castle Philipse. There the first lord of the manor lived while a larger house, completed in 1682, was building for him on land now in the centre of the present site of Yonkers, but which was then a high meadow commanding a long sweep of the Hudson. This house, occupied as a residence until 1868, and since then as the city-hall of Yonkers, is built mainly in the Dutch style. It is two and a half stories high, with a long, low façade, a steeply sloping roof, small dormer-windows, and broad doorways closed with hatched roofs. The wainscoted entrance-hall is very wide, and the spacious rooms opening from it have handsome decorations in arabesque. A simple but charming stairway leads to the second floor, where were the bedchambers, each with its fireplace ornamented with tiles brought over from Holland. The house was

Castle Philipse, Tarrytown, New York

built in most enduring fashion, and its every part remains to-day substantially as it was a hundred years ago. In this house the second lord of the manor lived in almost princely style after it assumed its present shape and size in 1745. There were two rent days on the manor, one at Castle Philipse for the tenants thereabouts, and the other at the manor-house for those in the lower part. These came close together in January, and on each day the tenants were entertained by their lord at dinner.

Beautiful Mary Philipse is the most gracious memory that now haunts the old manor hall. She was twenty-six years old and a most charming person, as her portrait shows, when, in 1756, she met George Washington at the house of a mutual friend in New York City. The young Virginian was deeply impressed by her charms, and, it has been asserted, vainly asked her to become his wife, but this seems to be an invention of romantic persons. When he left at the call of duty he asked one whom he could trust to inform him from time to time of the young woman's movements. He received news soon after that he had a rival in the person of Colonel Roger Morris, his old companion in arms under Braddock, and that he had better come to New York and look after his interests. He did not come, however, and in 1758 Mary Philipse became the wife of Colonel Morris.

When the war for independence came on the Philipse and Morris families espoused the royalist cause. Colonel Frederick Philipse, third and last lord of the manor, though not a strong partisan, was seized by the patriots when the British entered New York and carried prisoner to Boston. He was afterwards released, and the family, leaving the manor-house, took refuge in New York. Thence the colonel fled to England, established himself at Chester, and, dying there in 1785, was buried in the cathedral, where a monument proclaims his virtues and lauds his loyalty to the king. Colonel Morris and his wife, who following their marriage had made their home in what is now known as the Jumel mansion on Washington Heights, and which was built for Mrs. Morris by her brother, also went to England, where he died, in 1794, at the age of eighty-seven. His widow died in 1825, being then nearly ninety-six years of age.

Both Philipse and Morris having been attainted of treason by the patriots, their property was confiscated, in 1779, by legislative enactment, and sold six years later by commission of forfeiture. The British government, however, paid them at different times nearly half a million dollars to reimburse them for their losses. None of their descendants live in America, and only the houses in which they dwelt bear witness to the part once played by them in the land of the patroons.