The Lightning Conductor Discovers AmericaWilliamson, C. N. (Charles Norris)
General
The Lightning Conductor Discovers America
Williamson, C. N. (Charles Norris)
Automobiles -- Fiction
fort at a few minutes' notice. The walls were nearly three feet thick;
the seven windows were barred with iron, and so high up that, if the
Indians wanted to peep, they had to climb on each other's shoulders. As
for the doors, they could hardly be knocked in with a battering ram; so
you had no excuse to stop at home on Sunday, even in "Indian Summer." Of
course we went to see the grave where all that is mortal of Washington
Irving lies in the Sleepy Hollow cemetery; and the famous bridge--or,
rather, the new edition of it built by William Rockefeller.
Do you remember that Major Andre was taken on the Albany Post Road at
Tarrytown on his way to New York, with dispatches from the traitor
Benedict Arnold hidden in his stockings? I've always had a sneaking
sympathy with Andre, because he was gallant and young and good looking,
but Tarrytown isn't the place, I find, in which to express any such
sentimental feeling. He is still the villain of the piece there, a mere
spy, travelling in disguise, a treacherous wretch who long and
stealthily worked to corrupt a hitherto honourable general. He is the
villain, and David Williams, John Paulding, and Isaac Van Waart, the
scouting militiamen who took and searched him, are the heroes of that
drama of 1780. Tarrytown people are delighted to this day that Andre was
hanged, and they love the monument to his captors who wouldn't be bribed
by horse, or watch, or money. I suppose if Andre hadn't offered those
bribes, or said he belonged to the "Southern party," they might never
have thought of his stockings, he would have got safely to the waiting
ship, and on to New York; and Benedict Arnold would have surrendered
West Point to the British!
Heaps of other exciting things helped to make Tarrytown historic: an
Indian massacre, a big battle in the Revolution, Major Hunt's "bag of
British soldiers at Van Tassel's Tavern when he won fame by his shout,
'Gentlemen, clubs are trumps!'" and so on. But we took even more
interest in the old legends of Spook Rock, and Andre's ghost and Cuffy's
Prophecy and the Flying Dutchman, who of course tacks back and forth
across the Tappan Zee. Such things are so much more real than facts!
Besides, we had to "get on--get on!" that war cry of motoring men.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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