I could
decide on nothing good. Indeed, I did naught save mentally curse those
Washington revenue miscreants who, failing of blackmail, had destroyed
me for revenge.
Whatever comfort may lurk in curses, at least they carry no money
profit; so after a fruitless session over coffee and maledictions, I
arose, and as a calmative, walked down Broadway. At Trinity
churchyard, the gates being open, I turned in and began ramblingly to
twine and twist among the graves. There I encountered a garrulous old
man who, for his own pleasure, evidently, devoted himself to my
information. He pointed out the grave of Fulton, he of the steamboats;
then I was shown the tomb of that Lawrence who would "never give up
the ship"; from there I was carried to the last low bed of the
love-wrecked beautiful Charlotte Temple.
My eye at last, by the alluring voice and finger of the old guide, was
drawn to a spot under the tower where sleeps the Lady Cornbury, dead
now as I tell this, hardly two hundred years. Also I was told of that
Lord Cornbury, her husband, once governor of the colony for his
relative, Queen Anne; and how he became so much more efficient as a
smuggler and a customs cheat, than ever he was as an executive, that
he lost in 1708 his high employment.
Because I had nothing more worthy to occupy my leisure, I
listened--somewhat listlessly, I promise you, for after all I was
thinking of the future not the past, and considering of the living
rather than those old dead folk, obscure, forgotten in their slim
graves--I listened, I say, wordlessly to my gray historian; and
somehow, after I was free of him, the one thing that remained alive in
my memory was the smuggling story of our Viscount Cornbury.
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