Hugh Wynne, Free Quaker: Sometime Brevet Lieutenant-Colonel on the Staff of his Excellency General WashingtonMitchell, S. Weir (Silas Weir)
History
Hugh Wynne, Free Quaker: Sometime Brevet Lieutenant-Colonel on the Staff of his Excellency General Washington
Mitchell, S. Weir (Silas Weir)
Quakers -- Fiction; United States -- History -- Revolution, 1775-1783 -- Fiction
After the bedroom comedy, which much amused me and out of which my
aunt got great comfort, she was inclined to be on better terms with the
officers so abruptly thrust upon her. For a while, however, she declined
to eat her meals with them, and when told that they had had Colonel
Montresor to dine, and had drunk the king’s health, she sent all the
glasses they had used down to the blacks in the kitchen, and bade them
never to dare set them on her table again. This much delighted Count
Donop, who loved George of Hanover no better than did she, and I learned
that she declared the bread-and-butter business was the worst of Von
Knyphausen, and was no doubt a court custom. As to Count Donop, she
learned to like him. He spoke queer French, and did not smoke. _“Je
ne foume pas chamais, madame,”_ he said; _“mais le Cheneral, il foume
touchours, et Von Heiser le meme,”_ which was true. The count knew her
London friends, and grieved that he was sent on a service he did not
relish, and in which later he was to lose his life.
My aunt fed them well, and won at piquet, and declared they were much
to be pitied, although Von Heiser was a horror. When he had knocked down
her red-and-gold Delft vase, the gods and the other china were put away,
and then the rugs, because of the holes his pipe ashes burned, and still
she vowed it was a comfort they were not redcoats. Them she would have
poisoned.
Captain Andre alone was an exception. When, in 1776, he was made a
prisoner by Montgomery in Canada, and after that was on parole at
Lancaster, I met him; and as he much attracted me, my aunt sent him
money, and I was able to ease his captivity by making him known to our
friends, Mr. Justice Yeates and the good Cope people, who, being sound
Tories, did him such good turns as he never forgot, and kindly credited
to us. Indeed, he made for my aunt some pretty sketches of the fall
woods, and, as I have said, was welcome where no other redcoat could
enter.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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