It was the female bird chirping to her mate, and RoBards felt both proud and pitiful. Fortunately he could descry, not far ahead, a row of dormer windows breaking the roof of a long low house that he recognized as Varian’s Tavern at Scarsdale. A pock-marked milestone set there in 1773 mournfully announced that they were already XXI miles from New York. A great barn yawned for the tired horses, and they quickened their gait as they sniffed its plentiful fodder. Being a bridegroom, RoBards had worn his second-best suit, made for him only a little while before by Tryon and Derby, and it had reduced him to the fashionable immobility in which a gentleman of the mode almost rivaled a lady. His black frock was so tight across the chest, so short of waist, and so constricted of armhole, that he could hardly breathe, or drive the horses. The pantaloons (if one must mention them) were so snug to his skin, and the straps beneath his boots drew them so taut, that his nether limbs were all pins and needles, and when he stepped down from the carriage, he could hardly endure the exquisite distress. When he put up his arms for Patty, he heard the ominous hiss of a slipping seam in a sleeve. His poor bride was asleep all over, and could hardly rise from her seat or direct her fall across the wheel into his arms. They staggered tipsily to the tavern doorway, where RoBards checked her at the sill to point out the saber-scars still gashing the woodwork. The British had made them when they were plundering and pursuing the rebels along this very road nearly sixty years before. In the tavern lounged a crowd of loud and smelly Westerners who had goaded their herds all the way from Ohio, and were waiting here to haggle with the cattle-dealers from New York. But the cattle-dealers had their own hides to think of. In the fields about the tavern hundreds of horned pedestrians were content to graze at ease, while the cholera made New York a human slaughter-house. They had walked a long way to die, and they were in no haste. The inn’s good host, Colonel Varian, veteran of the War of 1812, gave the city travelers a welcome all the heartier for the contrast between Patty Jessamine and the disgusted and disgusting drovers, who bellowed their orders for his ale as if they had caught their voices, as well as their fragrance, from their cattle. In a secluded nook Patty forgot to be exquisite, and ate with the sincerity of hunger, and made fatigue an excuse for sipping a noggin from the brandy bottle that was a necessary part of all tableware. Then she prinked a little, and left at Varian’s what dust she had absorbed on the road hitherto. And so they drove on.