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In the soft autumn twilights of the days that followed, when the yellow Morris turnpike grew vague and shadowy and the stars dotted the sky like little candles lighting up a hundred pieces of rose- and dusk-tinted velvet, Freneau would mount his faithful Cato and ride through the avenue of locust-trees into the lane leading to Forman Place. Dear to their hearts were these trysts of the lovers. There were walks in the Forman garden, made a place of enchantment by the breath of Indian summer. Later came songs in Madam Forman's chintz parlor. All through their lives Nelly sang to her Philip the love-ditties of sighing Darbys and unhappy Joans; and even after his death, when very aged, it is said that she sometimes crooned to his spirit in a queer cracked voice the songs he once loved to hear.

Forman Place, still standing close to the village of Freehold, what a place of memories it is! The tired, weather-beaten old building which the sunshine seems to desecrate was once one of the happiest of homes. Now, like some sleepy antique dame belated after a revelry, it waits despairingly by the turn of the road for Father Time and his band of winds to sweep it away. Broad-shouldered and broad-hearted Samuel Forman, with a rubicund visage made familiar by Hogarth, was an ideal host. Oh, the Merry-Andrews and the witlings Euphrosyne brought there! "Better one's house be too little one day than too big all the year after" was his motto, and bantering bucks were broadcast round his board.

And Madam Forman, who came of a pious family, but was married at fifteen, early caught the infection from her spouse. None could resist the laugh of the portly dame so redolent of good-humor. Tongues that wagged said her handmaidens were willing to work their fingers off in her service if she would let them. Her daughters she cajoled into the idea that they were wits as well as beauties, and men, from callow youth down to the very grandfathers of the parish, worshipped the ground she tripped upon. Whether gracing her chintz parlor, garbed in a lustrous grenadine, her powdered hair covered with a hundred ringlets that dangled and danced as she talked, or in humble linsey-woolsey overseeing the daily baking, the chance guest was always sure of a welcome from the mistress of Forman Place.

"Heigh-ho! there's Jeremy, Juniper, or Tobias. What a lark!" the great voice of her lord and master would come floating over the staircase or from the depths of the cushioned grandfather's chair in the library. "Yes, he's here, Samuel, and promised to sup," the echo would answer. It was to this happy haven the horseman rode very often after the meeting by the stream.

The days drifted into months and the months into years, and the drama of the Revolution was nearing its triumphant end for the patriot. Monmouth was awakening as from a lethargy. After the ravages it had endured through the early periods of the war, life had become stagnant. At Mount Pleasant Hall Freneau had written many a stirring verse which had travelled from Concord to Yorktown, encouraging the ofttimes despairing soldiers. Not a memorable incident escaped his watchful eye. Behind the ardent and passionate desire for liberty was the inspiration of love to guide his pen. The love of country and the love of woman were intertwined, and it was his thrilling visions of the first that brought sweet dreams of the other real one to camp-fire and battle-field. Liberty was a strange and beautiful goddess that those tattered, wearied men knew not, and it was always the memory of the sweetheart's face that spurred them over rock-bound roads filled with multitudinous obstacles in quest of the shadowy creature. When they fell by the wayside or in the trenches, the look of peace on their white faces was not her doing, but the tender vows and the last kisses of the girls they had left behind them.

Samuel, in the great Hepplewaite chair, was silent. The mirth lines about his mouth drooped and lengthened. He liked Freneau, whose ready tongue always held a jest. His blue-eyed Nelly loved him, he knew. Furtively he turned and stole a glance at his wife for help to stem the wrath of the stern dictator, but the good dame held a handkerchief to her eyes. Trouble weighed heavily on her heart. Eleanor stood by the door gazing out of the blurred panes at the road that led to the Freneaus. Her face was pale, but suffused with the light of love. Before her was the highway of Fate, and her heart told her that it would not admit of another.

"David," she said, looking at him, "you may be a great man in war counsel, but when a woman is the question you know naught. With the man I love I could wander penniless but unwearied all through life."

There was silence; then Madam Forman tried to speak, but her voice was choked with sobs.

And so it was that the lovers met in the dying garden and said good-by. She told him of her brother's words, and into his life there came a new desire. His country needed his pen no longer. The fortune his father's will gave to his mother had been placed on the altar of patriotism, and much of it went into the ship "Aurora," captured by the British. He would leave his home to seek another fortune, and, when it was won, return and claim her.

The air was sultry and the moon hung like a dying taper over their heads. The fields that crept up to the Homdel hills he loved so well were gray. A north wind sighed among the wraiths of summer in the garden, a harbinger that the dawn would be fresh and clear.

"I shall never marry any one else," she told him. "My window faces the bend of the road, and there I shall place a candle every night to light your steps when they bring you back to me. Often I shall go to the little stream and wonder where you are wandering. Never fear. I shall wait for you forever and forever, until my cheeks fade and my eyes grow dim."

Like one of the flowers in the garden trying to hide its head from the death-stings of the wind, she nestled in his arms. The moon grew faint behind the clouds, and the soughing low and melodious, for a woman's heart was being spilled over the highway.

The next morning a small procession left Mount Pleasant Hall and crept over the Morris turnpike road to the Point. There were the poet and his mother in the antiquated chaise, Josiah, an old negro household slave, mounted on Cato, and several of the field servants, carrying a large wooden chest, following on foot. The air was fresh and strong, and, although the day was young, the blue of the sky deep and pure. John Burrowes's sailing-vessel was to leave Kearny Port, bound for Philadelphia, before the noon hour.

The sunshine played over the yellow, clay-stained road, and off in the distance the sea was a sheet of burnished gold. Some place where its arms spread was the promised land the poet hoped to find. There his work would bring him a reward that would help him to win his love.

At the Port the vessel was anchored in the calm inlet with her bowsprit pointed to the dancing waves beyond. Old Mrs. Burrowes, the corn merchant's wife, with some of her grandchildren, was on the wharf to see him off. When she saw the Freneau chaise, she ran forward to meet its occupants. "Yes, I am very sure my husband can take Mr. Freneau to Philadelphia," she said, in answer to their inquiries. Mrs. Freneau alighted and sat with her on one of the grain sacks while the poet went to seek Mr. Burrowes. All about them was bustle and confusion preparatory to a long cruise. Soon came the hour of leaving and the last farewells. Tears filled the mother's eyes as she kissed her son. Once before she had watched him depart to wrestle with the world beyond her quiet land. No cruel war was to claim him now, and yet she could not hide her anguish at parting. His own heart was full of courage and the breath of the sea was like wine to him. The fortune his mother had given to her country he would build again! As he embraced his mother, before his eyes was the face of the woman he thought the most beautiful in the world. She was worth the price of conquest.

After Philip left, Eleanor took to watching the highway. It had brought him to her, and in the dawn, the noonday, and the dusk she looked out upon it from the windows of her room, longing for his return. Every night she placed the candle in the farthest sill, as she promised him at parting. He was constantly in her thoughts. As time went on other suitors came to Forman Place to pay to her their addresses. Hezekiah Stout, the great mill-owner of Englishtown, was one of them. That Revolutionary Croesus received more encouragement from David than from the lady of his choice. Hezekiah proved a patient lover, for when she refused to see him, he would sit silently blinking on the Forman settle for hours at a time, until Madam Forman, the best-natured woman in the world, vowed to herself that, with all his money, he was too stupid a man to wed her daughter.

And the little silver stream that whispered its secrets to the slim pine-trees, how it missed the pair! Many a time it wearily watched the winter wane and earth cast off her white mantle. The wild anemones came, the primroses and the crocuses and all that lovely company of fragile blooms which mark the footsteps of hope. "Oh, if he would but come now while I mirror so much beauty," the stream crooned to herself. Sometimes she would see among the flowers the reflection of the fair face he loved. Then the little stream was happy. "She at least remembers, and perhaps he will come soon," she sang in joy to the pine-trees. Then the grasses grew high, and the golden sunshine lured the dragon-flies to flit among the fragrant worlds along her course. Still he came not. She began to grow impatient. Perhaps her heart would be dried up before his children strolled by her side and waded in her clear water. The leaves began to fall, and the worlds along her course knew that the night was coming on. "He has forgotten," the stream moaned; "forgotten." And, hundreds of miles away, he heard her voice, and in the hold of an ice-bound ship wrote to his stream and his love, whom he called Cynthia, these tender verses:

"Through Jersey groves a wandering stream That still its wonted music keeps Inspires no more my evening dream, Where Cynthia, in retirement, sleeps.

"Sweet murmuring stream, how blest art thou To kiss the bank where she resides! Where nature decks the beechen bough That trembles o'er your shallow tides.

"To me, alas! so far removed, What raptures, once, that scenery gave, Ere, wandering yet from all I loved, I sought a deeper, drearier wave.

"Your absent charms my thoughts employ, I sigh to think how sweet you sung, And half adore the painted toy That near my careless heart you hung.

"Now, fettered fast in icy fields, In vain we loose the sleeping sail; The frozen wave no longer yields, And useless blows the favoring gale.

"Yet still in hopes of vernal showers And breezes moist with morning dew, I pass the lingering, lazy hours Reflecting on the spring--and you."

Mammon proved a cruel and elusive mistress to Freneau, and she led him many a fruitless errand in pursuit of her. For several years he commanded the brig "Washington," owned by his brother Peter. In this ship he made many journeys to the West Indies, and by clever trading at last succeeded in amassing a small competence. With this he returned to Mount Pleasant Hall after an absence of nearly six years.

In the spring of that year the lovers were united. The wedding held in Forman Place was a very simple affair, attended by only a few of the Monmouth neighborhood. After his marriage the poet took his bride home to Mount Pleasant Hall, and later to Philadelphia, where Mrs. Freneau's little salon played a part in the history of the capital. A diary of Freneau's life in that city is said to be in existence, and it is to be hoped that it will some day come to light.

The love-letters of the charming Freneaus, written for the most part in verse, were destroyed many years ago. Several of the poems compiled in the editions of Freneau's works are thought to have been written by his wife. Like Mrs. Wordsworth, who is credited with helping her husband with his masterpiece, "The Daffodils," Mrs. Freneau lent her deft hand to beautifying "The Wild Honeysuckle," the most exquisite poem written by an American in the eighteenth century.

"Fair flower that dost so comely grow, Hid in this silent, dull retreat, Untouched thy honey blossoms blow, Unseen thy little branches greet; No roving foot shall crush thee here, No busy hand provoke a tear.

"Smit with those charms, that must decay, I grieve to see your future doom; They died--nor were those flowers more gay, The flowers that did in Eden bloom; Unpitying frosts and autumn's power Shall leave no vestige of this flower.

"From morning's suns and evening's dews At first thy little being came; If nothing once, you nothing lose, For when you die you are same; The space between is but an hour, The frail duration of a flower."

One cannot read these verses without entering into a closer intimacy with "The Poet of the Revolution" and the beautiful Eleanor Forman. Their courtship was idyllic, and during the long stretch of years they walked together hand in hand the flame of love never diminished, but grew brighter. From the day of their marriage, when Freneau is recorded as having compared his blushing bride to Fielding's "Amelia," the ideal characterization of womanhood, until one wintry dawn forty-five years later, when a trembling, aged Eleanor bent over the lifeless body of her lover lulled to sleep in a snow-drift, no discordant note entered the sweet harmony of their lives. When shadows dimmed their pathway, they clung closer to each other. Even death could not separate them. When Freneau was under the sod and the world disputing over the few poor bay leaves it had allowed him, her mind was constantly with the lover of her youth. In her maidenhood she had watched weary years for him to come back to her, and at the last, when his voice was hushed in "the land of no returning," she longed to go to him.

THE CHEVALIER DE SILLY AND HIS NEWPORT SALLY

THE CHEVALIER DE SILLY AND HIS NEWPORT SALLY

In the old portion of Newport, where the houses are compact and the streets hilly and narrow, is the Vernon mansion, erected many years before the Revolution, when the city ranked second only to Boston in commercial supremacy. William Vernon, its first owner, was one of the wealthy old-time traders whose fleet of merchantmen made the long wharf famous. There, in the days before British guns were trained on the city and stanch, opulent warehouses flanked the quays, his jolly tars would unload the cargoes of West Indian sugar and bring out of some brave ship's hold the half a hundred blacks. Most of those ship-loads of sugar would be made into rum and sent back to Africa or the Indies for more blacks; but the savages never saw their native homes again, and became the faithful Cudjos and Pompeys of many a colonial household.

Quaint Mary Lane, or Street, as it is now called, running past the Vernon residence, is truly a thoroughfare of memories. For a period of three years it was trodden by the feet of thousands of British soldiers, and later the gallant Frenchmen of Rochambeau's fleet of seven ships of the line and five frigates walked there disconsolately in groups of three or four, hoping soon to sail away from the poverty-stricken place Newport was at that period of its existence. No longer were there gentlemen of fortune like Colonel Godfrey Malbone, who so often clinked silver goblets with his guests over groaning tables, to give entertainments. The town was almost destitute of wealth, and but a small number of the better class of its population came back to their former dwellings during the French fleet's stay there.

Life in Newport during 1780 and 1781 was for the most part a dreary thing to these Frenchmen, but a host of dashing chevaliers fresh from the Court of "the Austrian," as spiteful Madame Ad?la?de had nicknamed her fair niece, were sure to find some amusement even in the dullest city. It is true there was no "prince of youth," as the court ringleader, the Comte d'Artois, was dubbed by his intimates, to lead them through days of delight as at Versailles and Fontainebleau, but Newport gallants soon introduced them to town beauties, and cards were laid for the ever new and exciting game of love. In lieu of the cabriolet races in the Bois de Boulogne they could skate in the little creeks about the Point, and when dreams of the Palais Royal made them long for "Armid" and "Alcestio," there was always a dame to finger a spinet. Old citizens of the past generation used to tell of window-panes in the Vernon mansion covered with the names of Newport's femininity. With the same spirit which later led their compatriots to jest and dance amid the grim shadows of the Conceirgerie, they made the best of a changed life.

Mrs. Cowley's assembly-room, famous in Newport annals, was made over into a salon for play, and there the youth of the army would often stray when the periods of duty were over. We can see the haughty Rochambeau with his muff bending over the tric-trac table, while about him flutter the very flower of France,--men bearing such names as Marquis de Chastelleux, Marquis de Laval, Baron de Closen, Vicomte de Noailles, Marquis de Custine, Comte de Fersen, and Duc de Lauzun. They who had lost and won their louis to the laughter of the fairest women of a famous court had for sole spectators little village gamins peering in at the windows. Before the glitter of gold these graceful gamesters forgot time and place. They were back again at tables in the gardens of Paris,--recreation spots as lovely as Little Trianon, where Oberkirche wrote, "The glades were perfumed with lilacs and peopled with nightingales--The air full of fragrant mist brightened by butterflies." Off came their tinselled coats, and in their stead some of them donned frieze great-coats, while the more intrepid rolled thin soft linen shirt-sleeves up to the elbow for luck. To guard their eyes from the light and keep their powdered wigs in place, they tied on straw-crowned hats festooned with some forgotten charmer's colors. The Maybud plucked many moons before, which nestled so often 'neath a tassel, was faded. Cliff flowers were in full bloom then.

Three famous beauties were Miss Champlin, who danced with stately Washington; Miss Redwood, to whose charms the sailors in the street would doff their caps, holding them low until she passed; and Sally Church, the sprightly maiden who, tradition says, tripped into the hearts of a small army of Frenchmen when she returned from Providence to her native city about the time of the French fleet's arrival.

Sally Church! how prim the pseudonym, and yet very vivacious was its owner. A charming vision in her red wool gown and huge fur tippet, we see her mincing merrily through that Mary Street on a blustering March morning. The wind blows her wide London hat and gives it a saucy tilt, and the eyes of a long line of soldiers follow the wave of her skirt as it plays about her trim ankles. "Here comes Sally in her chair," or "Here comes Sally on foot," were among the most interesting pieces of news her admirers had to impart. They ogled and sang to her, wrote poems on her beauty; and yet at most of them she only laughed, and so they ended by worshipping her.

As the months flew by there lay in one of the rooms of the Vernon mansion, which Rochambeau had made his head-quarters, a young lieutenant by the name of Chevalier de Silly, suffering from a disease protracted by the severe cold. Having heard his brother officers dilate on the charms of the lovely Sally, he desired that his bed be removed close to the window, in hope that he might obtain a glimpse of her. Many a weary hour he spent gazing out into the gray line of the street unrewarded, and then one happy day he espied her. The fates favored him, and Sally, chancing to look up at his window, smiled and thereby added another soldier to her own little army. Soon the Chevalier grew better and was able to assume the duties of his post. His friendship with Sally had progressed by this time and she was becoming the torment of his life,--an agony far worse than bodily illness. As he stood on duty--a grim sentinel--before the Vernon mansion, the maiden would happen to stroll by.

"Come, Silly," she would call, "take me for a walk to the old mill."

"I cannot, mademoiselle," was his usual sad answer; "the king's service goes before everything."

"You do not love me or you would take me," she always mocked, and with a proud toss of her head she would hasten past him, heedless of his torrent of reproaches.

And so "Silly and his Sally," as the youth and the maiden came to be dubbed by the garrison, spent their days. Tradition says that she was fonder of him than of any other of her French swains, but, womanlike, enjoyed the power of her fascinations. But she was not to keep him in her train forever. The springlike day dawned when General Washington, "the Atlas of America," Silly called him, was to arrive. At Barney's Ferry he landed in a gayly decorated barge, and all Newport was out to greet him. The troops formed a solid line three deep on either side from the long wharf to the very door of the Vernon mansion, where he was to be entertained by Rochambeau. The following night all Newport was illuminated, and old records say that the Town Council ordered candles to be purchased and given to all who were too poor to use them, so that every house should show a light. About the streets the hero rode, followed by the French officers, their aides, and hundreds of patriotic citizens bearing candle torches to make the occasion joyful. The night was clear, the sea calm, and the wind still. Those who participated in the affair never forgot the beauty of the scene. Sally was in the crowd, but there was no Silly by her side, for the disconsolate Chevalier wrote to a friend that, "after General Washington, she who attracted my attention was the amiable Sally Church accompanied, alas! by a faithful townsman who was free of a touch of the gout."

A few days later, when the gout departed, the Chevalier had his revenge on her other suitors at a ball given by the city of Newport to General Washington and Admiral Rochambeau, in Mrs. Cowley's assembly-room. There, to the rippling airs of Gluck, so beloved by musical little Marie Antoinette, he showed the company many of the famous Guimard steps, as he essayed the gavottes of his king. Sally would look at him often, admiration springing forth from her sparkling eyes, as he gracefully swayed to music, one moment gay and the next sinking into a gentle cadence. This is one of the last records we have of Sally and her Silly dancing out the swift-footed hours in the taper-lighted ballroom.

Numerous accounts of the ball have come down to us. The decorations were intrusted to Dezoteux, one of the aides of the Baron de Viom?nil, and the guests are said to have been loud in the appreciation of his efforts. Washington opened the festivities by leading out Miss Champlin in a minuet. When midnight was near at hand and frolic and mirth at their highest pitch, the gallant Rochambeau and several of his officers led an assault on the startled musicians, and, seizing their instruments, played the tune, "A Successful Campaign,"--a graceful token of respect to the Commander-in-Chief of the army.

We picture them together when he homeward walks beside her chair, the constant lover, to her very gate. With the memory of the music in her ears, the stars overspreading the sky a dazzling canopy, and a cavalier by her side, could she ask for more? And yet she did, and, alack-a-day, as she herself would have said, the stream of her life was not always so fresh and frolicking. Could the chairmen tell us more? No doubt; but leave the door tight shut and spare a lady's blushes.

The day came when the Chevalier de Silly sailed away to Yorktown, and the maiden was left to work her witcheries on her townsmen. Newport was a changed place after the French departed. Many a true heart was exchanged that morning for a golden button or some other token. The mothers only were happy, and back to households came a troop of long-exiled femininity, free from the fret of love. Twelve years later, it is said, one summer dawn in Paris there rolled through the streets a tumbril on its way to a guillotine erected near the gardens of the Luxembourg. One of its occupants was De Silly. In the hush which always fell on the mob when a victim reached the last step of the stairway of death we wonder whether the fair face of Sally Church came before the eyes of her poor Chevalier. The answer is lost in the length of long-dead years. Over the cries of that surging mass of humanity when the blade snapped the thread of his life we see them once again living out their Newport romance.

SUSANNA ROWSON, OF "CHARLOTTE TEMPLE" FAME, AND HER BRITISH GRENADIER

SUSANNA ROWSON, OF "CHARLOTTE TEMPLE" FAME, AND HER BRITISH GRENADIER

Overlooking Nantasket's white beach, and guarded, as it were, by the little hills of Hull, is a dwelling, now entirely changed, where Susanna Haswell spent her girlhood. A quarter of a century ago it was still as the Haswells left it when they were forced to remove to the neighboring town of Hingham, practically prisoners of war. Then it was described as a large one-story wooden building with a huge chimney in the centre, one of a type to be found in hundreds of old New England villages. In the days when the English maiden conned her lessons as her father painted quaint stilted landscapes on the doors and mantel-pieces of his abode the house was approached through a line of fruit-trees, and close to the gray walls that the sea-mist loved to kiss grew the multitude of flowers that flourished in the sweet plots of the descendants of the Puritans.

Somehow it is with the garden of her early home that we associate the young Susanna. Tradition says that it was her especial care, and she helped the seeds her stepmother brought from Boston to perfect bloom and watched each season for her fairy children. There we know, in the autumn of 1768, when her last garden inmates were dying, she saw the British fleet of six men-of-war enter Nantasket Roads, little dreaming that they were to affect her life. Later in the day she helped her father receive some of the officers. It is easy to picture her, a simply garbed child, listening to the talk of the circle about the fireplace. How her eyes must have glistened at the tales of the theatres,--the sprightly new comedy "The Perplexities," which was put on at Covent Garden; "The English Merchant," with its witty prologue by Garrick. Then there was chatter of the new tea-gardens that were springing up everywhere on the skirts of London Town. Wonderful they seemed with their grottos of mystery and Chinese lanterns that rivalled the stars. The talk of war she would not listen to, and we see her leave the company to creep to the door and gaze out on the silent night. Very lonely her home looked in the darkness, and off in the distance she could hear the dull boom of the surf telling her that London Town was far away.

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