"Yes. Eight tall poplars." "The Manor House stood there. Tarleton burnt it--set it afire with all its beautiful furniture and silver and linen! His hussars ran through it, setting it afire and shooting at the mirrors and slashing the silks and pictures! And when the Major's young wife entered the smoking doorway to try to save a pitiful little trinket or two, an officer--never mind who, for his descendants may be living to-day in England--struck her with the flat of his sword and cut her and struck her to her knees! That is the truth!" He said politely: "You are intensely interested in--er--colonial and revolutionary history." "Yes. What else have I to think of--here?" "I suppose many interesting memories of those times cluster around this old place," he said, violently stifling a yawn. He had risen early and run far. Hunger and slumber contended for his mastery. "Many," she said simply. "Just by the gate yonder they captured young Alsop Hunt and sent him away to the Provost Prison in New York. In the road below John Buckhout, one of our dragoons, was trying to get away from one of Tarleton's dragoons of the 17th Regiment; and the British trooper shouted, 'Surrender, you damned rebel, or I'll blow your brains out!' and the next moment he fired a bullet through Buckhout's helmet. 'There,' said the dragoon, 'you damned rebel, a little more and I should have blown your brains out!' 'Yes, damn you,' replied John, 'and a little more and you wouldn't have touched me!'" Brown looked at her amused and astonished to hear such free words slip so eagerly from a mouth which, as he looked at it, seemed to him the sweet mouth of a child. "Where did _you_ ever hear such details?" he asked. "People told me. Besides, the house is full of New York newspapers. You may read them if you wish. I often do. Many details of the fight are there." "Reading such things out of old newspapers published at the time certainly must bring those events very vividly before you." "Yes. . . . It is painful, too. The surprise and rout of Sheldon's 2nd dragoons--the loss of their standard; the capture, wounding, and death of more than two score--and--oh! that young death there in the wheat! the boy lying in the sun with one arm across his face and the broken pistol in his hand! and his wife--the wife of a month--dragging him back to this house--with the sunset light on his dead face!" "To _this_ house?" She dropped her hand lightly on his shoulder and pointed. "Tarleton's troopers came stamping and cursing in by that very door after they had burned Judge Lockwood's and the meeting house--but they left her alone with her dead, here on the floor where you and I are standing. . . . She was only seventeen; she died a few months later in child-birth. God dealt very gently with her."