It was the custom of the Rev. Thomas Ellison when he became too feeble to personally direct his workmen, to sit upon the stoop of the Rectory and watch the removal of the sandbank which covered the chosen site for the new church, corner of State and Lodge streets. Hundreds of loads had to be carted away before the foundation could be laid, and some of the carter's pay tickets on quartered playing-cards are preserved in St. Peter's archives. But the great hole in the ground had a great attraction for the boys of Albany, and they would leap into it to play tag and leap-frog until the stern voice of the Dominie called them to order, when they would scamper away or hide in some corner out of sight of the piercing eyes of Dr. Ellison. Sometimes they would answer him mockingly, to his great annoyance. He could not pursue them, but he could, when his own pupils joined with the other boys, as they often did, give them stern and severe lectures upon their conduct, for they were playing on ground to be used for a sacred purpose. Even the rod of correction was used without curing them of this habit. Young Cooper was often a ringleader, and their pranks would often continue until darkness concealed them from the watchful and angry Rector, to whom, nevertheless, they gave due honor and respect. [Illustration: ST. PETER'S CHURCH, ALBANY, N.Y.] [Illustration: STATE STREET, ALBANY, N.Y., 1802.] From one of his "Sketches of England," written to William, Judge John Jay's second son, comes, in part, Cooper's graphic description of Dr. Ellison: "Thirty-six years ago you and I were school fellows and classmates in the home of a clergyman of the true English school. This man entertained a most profound reverence for the King and the nobility; was not backward in expressing his contempt for all classes of dissenters and all ungentlemanly sects; was particularly severe on the immoralities of the French Revolution, and, though eating our bread, was not especially lenient to our own; compelled you and me to begin Virgil with the eclogues, and Cicero with the knotty phrases that open the oration in favor of the poet Archias, because these writers would not have placed them first in the books if they did not intend people to read them first; spent his money freely and sometimes that of other people; was particularly tenacious of the ritual and of all decencies of the Church; detested a democrat as he did the devil; cracked his jokes daily about Mr. Jefferson, never failing to place his libertinism in strong relief against the approved morals of George III., of several passages in whose history it is charitable to suppose he was ignorant; prayed fervently on Sunday; decried all morals, institutions, churches, manners but those of England from Monday to Saturday."