The finale ("Loaned by Ethan Flagg") signifies that it was placed here by a descendant of the defrauded Lord of the Manor. Our cut gives the testimonial exactly as it stands upon the wall of an American temple of Justice. Across the pathos of lines penned in sad good faith, flickers a gleam of humor that was never in the mind of composer or scribe, as the reader contrasts tablet with environment.

S we have read in the story of the Philipse Manor-House, the most brilliant wedding of the year 1758 was celebrated in the drawing

room of that famous homestead when Mary Philipse gave her hand to Roger Morris. The bridegroom was a son of Charles Morris of Wandsworth, England,

had served under Braddock, and otherwise distinguished himself in the British army. The

bride was "a woman of

great beauty as well as force of will," writes one historian who cannot withhold the gratui

tous assumption-"If she had married Washington, some think she would have made him a royalist."

The gossip of her conquest of the Great Rebel has had more to do with keeping her name alive than her "great beauty" of person and strength of character. Mary Cary, the wife of Edward Ambler, Gentleman, was living at Jamestown, Virginia. Colonel Beverley

Robinson whose father had resided for a time in Williamsburg, then the capital of the Old Dominion, might have been able to tell his beautiful sister-in-law something of that early romance that would have abated the natural vanity every woman feels in the review of the "rejected addresses" which are, after a few years, of no value except to the (former) owner.

There is no accounting for feminine taste in the matter of husbands. Mary Morris would not have cared a whit for the old affair with that other Mary, if she had ever heard it (which is unlikely). Nor did she envy the Widow Custis, although news came to her early in 1759 of another splendid wedding, this time in tide-water Virginia. When she and her Roger took possession of the fine house he had built for her on Harlem Heights,

she would not have exchanged places with any other matron or maid in the New World, or in the Old. Her well-beloved brother Frederick lived, literally like a lord, in the dear old Manor-House under the balustraded roof of which she had drawn her first breath; her sister Susan was the happy wife of a gallant officer and the mistress of fair Beverley. Neither of these homes was more beautiful for situation than the newer mansion constructed to please her fancy and to subserve her convenience.

The growing city of New York was visible between the clumps of the native forest-trees which Roger Morris had the good sense to leave standing upon the spreading lawn.

New York, at that date, as a sprightly writer tells us, "was a city without a bath-room, without a furnace, with bed-rooms which, in winter, lay within the Arctic Zone, with no ice during the torrid summers, without an omnibus, without a moustache, without a match, without a latch-key."

It was no worse off in these respects than older London, we may observe in passing. Whatever of comfort and luxury pertained to the age was as much Mrs. Morris's as if her husband's domain were a dukedom on the