Another relic in that locality well worth keeping is the Duryea place, a striking old stone farm-house with a wide window on the second floor, now shut in with a wooden cover supported by a long brace-pole reaching to the ground. Out of this window, it is said, a cannon used to point. This was while the house was head-quarters for Hessian officers, during the long monotonous months when "the main army of the British army lay at Flushing from Whitestone to Jamaica;" and upon Flushing Heights there stood one of the tar-barrel beacons that reached from New York to Norwich Hill, near Oyster Bay. The British officers used to kill time by playing at Fives against the blank wall of the Quaker Meeting-house, or by riding over to Hempstead Plains to the fox-hunts--where the Meadowbrook Hunt Club rides to the hounds to-day. The common soldiers meanwhile stayed in Flushing and amused themselves, according to the same historian, by rolling cannon-balls about a course of nine holes. That was probably the nearest approach to the great game at that time in America, and it may have been played on the site of the present Flushing Golf Club. These same soldiers also amused themselves in less innocent ways, so that the Quakers and other non-combatants in and about this notorious Tory centre used to hide their live stock indoors over night, to keep it from being made into meals by the British. That may account for the habit of the family occupying the Duryea place referred to; they keep their cow in a room at one end of the house. At any rate it is not necessary for New Yorkers to go to Ireland to see sights of that sort. Those are a few of the historic country places that have come to town. There is a surprisingly large number of them, and even when they are not adopted and tableted by the D. A. R. or D. R., or S. R. or S. A. R., they are at least known to local fame, and are pointed out and made much of.