She glanced with amazement at the wildness around her, the maples and wild rhododendrons, and all the Westchester paradise of leaves and flowers crowding in the little-used highway, brushing the fetlocks of the horses, falling back like sickled wheat from the scythe of the wheels, and bending down from above to flail the carriage top with fragrant leaf-laden wands. And now at last she spied his great tulip tree, and the Lilliputian house beneath it, and she was weary enough to welcome the welcome they vouchsafed. The carriage rolled across a brief wooden bridge above a merry water. “That’s old Bronck his river,” he told her. “And these hills were the stronghold that Washington fell back to after the British drove him out of the White Plains. Ignorant old General Howe had ordered his navy to sail up the Bronx, and when the ships could not even find the little creek, Howe feared to advance any further. He sneaked away to capture Fort Washington by treachery. “Our tulip trees won the praise of Washington while the great man was here. Perhaps that very tree is the son of one of those that shed its blossoms on his tent. Tulip trees are hard to persuade; they won’t grow where you plant them. But this one came to live here of its own accord when my father built this house for my mother. “Strange, isn’t it, my darling, that they should have come out here—in 1805, it was—to escape from another pestilence? It was the yellow fever then. It had been breaking out every few years before, but that year it was frightful, and my mother was a bride then just as you are now. “They went back to New York because she grew lonely, but they came out again with the next fever summer. I was born here. Ten years ago I came out for a while. That was another yellow fever year. Even you remember that far back, don’t you?” “Oh, yes, Mist’ RoBards. That was when they moved the Post Office, the Customs House, the banks, the newspapers, the churches—even my father’s store, out to Greenwich Village. But we went back in the late fall. When shall we go back now?” “God knows!” he groaned. “I should be glad to stay here with you forever.” “It’s lonely, though—a little, don’t you think, Mist’ RoBards?” “Not with you. We’d best forget New York. It’s a doomed city now.” “Oh, don’t say that!” “Dr. Chirnside called this a visitation of God’s judgment. It’s not the first. Every few years the warning comes; the people run away and repent, and live in simple villages or on their farms; but when the plague has passed over they go back; they throw open their gaudy homes, wash off the mark of the angel of the Passover on the bloody lintels of their doors, and start up the carnival again. The men get drunk, the women tipple and flirt. They dance all night, gamble, carouse, divorce, live beyond their means, neglect the poor. Look at the churches on Sunday! Hardly a man there; all women, and not many of them. Not one in ten goes to church Sundays.”