USA > New Jersey > Somerset County > Within a Jersey circle : tales of the past, grave and gay, as picked up from old Jerseyites > Part 5
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"Confound you ! for two cents I'd-" and he chased the alarmed Hufty down the stoop and half a block awav.
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Hufty's office entailed the gathering of paupers from all quarters of the county into the fold of the poor farm. When he found new candidates he went to a justice of the peace of the district to have the proper papers made out. Justices were then called squires in Warren County. So one day early in the morning Hufty climbed the stoop and gave a loud knock at the door of the Squire of Beatty- town. The Squire, who was a fine stately, well-groomed looking man, had one cardinal weakness; which was a kind of dread that sooner or later he would fall a victim to one or other of the infectious diseases, which in those days so often swept whole communities into their graves. Answering the knock in person :
"Why, good morning, Hufty," he said. "You're abroad early. Won't you step in? We're just eating breakfast. Ah, a little business. That'll be all right. But breakfast first, business after's my plan, always. Step right in, Hufty."
Hufty did step in and was pleasantly greeted by the lady of the house and her rising family, all seated around the amply furnished table.
"Take that chair, Hufty, and sit up," said the affable squire, resuming his own seat. But the faithful overseer of the poor seemed to remember something that ought to be mentioned and stood tapping the rim of his old high- crowned beaver hat against his puckered lips.
"I-I hope you'll really excuse me, squire," he stam- mered, "but, in point of fact, I have already had break- fast and, thank you kindly all the same, while you finish yours I think I ought to be looking to see if a wagon can be hired in the town. For, you see, m'am," he said, 6
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bowing slightly to the hostess, "the poor people I found up at Port Murray this morning, a family of ten they are, m'am, are very sick. In point of fact, I helped turn the poor man on the bed myself, m'am, before I left the house to come here. He is dying, I think, and tell the truth, I don't know how they can be moved; for more than half of the family are down with it. I mean with the small- pox and-"
"What!" thundered the squire, jumping to his feet; "smallpox ! You-scoundrel! You in that house and came straight to mine! Get out of here, or by- Away! or I'll kick your contaminating little carcass into the street ! Don't touch that door knob! Confound you! for two cents I'd-" and he chased the alarmed Hufty down the stoop and half a block away, the poor little man still hugging his stovepipe hat, with his long hair stream- ing back as he barely escaped with his life.
RANDOM TALES OF HORACE GREELEY.
HE WAS A DEVOTED LOVER AND AN EARNEST LECTURER, BUT HIS TABLE MANNERS WERE VERY BAD.
His Wife Trained an Angel.
The little village of Lamington, near Pluckemin, was once a familiar and favorite resort of Horace Greeley. In the midst of his labors in building up the farbric of a great metropolitan newspaper-one that will always be associated with his name-from the piles of correspond- ence mounting on his desk, which included dispatches from the highest in the land, Mr. Greeley would often select for first perusal, a little, daintily addressed envelope which he knew came from Lamington. Then for a brief moment, forgetting the glorious grime and grind at the galleys of Printing House Square, through which he of- ten swayed the trend of even national affairs, there would be a softening of the lines of the great man's counten- ance, as from all these he "lightly turned to thoughts of love."
Some time in the early thirties Mr. Greeley happened to dine at a vegetarian hotel in New York, where he met Miss Mary T. Cheney, a school teacher, a native of Wa- tertown, N. C., at table and promptly fell in love with her. Miss Cheney, who was spending her vacation in the city, soon returned to her charge, which was at the little Foot of the Lane School, close to Lamington,
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whither she appears to have taken the great editor's heart along with her.
For at frequently recurring intervals thereafter he ap- peared at Bound Brook in his familiar white overcoat and with a tuck on the right leg of his trousers and none on the left, and would scale the mountain; or, if coming by Somerville, would trek his way, often on foot, the ten or more miles to Mr. Kennedy's house at Vliets Mills, about half way between Pottersville and Lamington, where Miss Cheney dwelt.
For some time before Mr. Greeley and she were mar- ried Miss Cheney lived with a Mrs. Duickinck, close to the Foot of the Lane School. This woman's descendants relate some interesting things about the Greeleys. She used to say they were very fine and most agreeable peo- ple, but both full of fads of their own. From her de- scription, Miss Cheney must have been a typically strong- mined person, with her full share of advanced ideas about woman's proper sphere, etc.
Facetious persons will say that Mrs. Duickinck has left corroborative evidence of the truth of this in the fur- ther information she supplied that Miss Cheney, who built her own fires in the school, one day most terribly alarmed a few of her early scholars by fainting dead away at the sight of a little mouse. The moment she opened the stove door the little rodent bounced out and the teacher collapsed.
After the Greeleys were married and their first baby was about a year old, Mrs. Greeley came to see Mrs. Duickinck and other old friends and to let her first born breathe the salubrious air among the well remembered
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rural beauties of fair Somerset. Early in the visit she astonished Mrs. Duickinck with a minute account of the system on which she would bring up her little one-"the only rational and proper system," she declared it to be. The child was fed, not when it cried for food, but when the hands of the clock pointed to certain hours. And as soon as fed, instead of being dandled or rocked to sleep, the little thing, clad in very loose and spare swaddling clothes, was laid on the floor of an adjoining room, to cry and kick and sprottle at its own sweet will, until it tired itself and lay still, or kept on rolling or creeping and cry- ing as it pleased. In other words, it was allowed to "de- velop itself," the mother explained.
Another part of the system was in operation one morn- ing, just as Dr. Cornelius C. Suydam happened to be pass- ing in his gig. That is to say, Mrs. Greeley was holding her screaming infant under the pump with one hand, while with the other she vigorously worked the handle, sending a flood of almost ice cold water over the little martyr.
"For God's sake, madam, what are you doing to the poor child?" the physician shouted.
"I'm going to make a perfect woman of my baby girl, when she grows up, sir," the mother proudly answered.
"You'll make an angel of her long before that; and that's more than any woman ever was! Take my word for it!" the doctor said and passed on.
When able to walk, after the pump bath the child was made to run naked a certain number of times around the table-not a lap more or less than the strict regulation number. Another phase of Mrs. Greeley's system-but
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this she acknowledged to be experimental-was that of keeping her little one entirely isolated from speech of any kind from any one, so as to find what sounds it would naturally invent to make known its wants. This, accord- ing to the testimony of both the daughter and stepdaugh- ter of Mrs. Duickinck, was carried out until the child was quite large-at least four, or probably, five years of age. Up to that age, they say, the child never uttered any more intelligible sound than "oo-oo!" whatever wants it wished to express. But the humane Dr. Suydam proved to be right; for the poor child died, while the extraor- dinary experiment was still in progress.
Mrs. Greeley utterly condemned the use of any kind of shortening in bread. In fact, she preferred wheat kernels in their natural state and ate great quantities. One day, on a visit at Dr. McDowell's, at Larger Cross Roads, when helped to bread she smelt of it:
"I cannot eat this bread," she said, "there's lard in it." The incident very much discomposed the hostess and prac- tically spoiled the visit.
On January 16, 1872, the last year of his life, Horace Greeley gave a lecture on temperance in the Second Church of Mendham. He stayed over night with Rev. T. W. Cochran, of that place, who gathered a number of friends to meet his distinguished visitor. Tea was an- nounced soon after Mr. Greeley's arrival. After a bless- ing was asked the host passed a plate of cold chicken to Mr. Greeley, who helped himself liberally. As the plate was passed to another guest, the host attempted to hand Mr. Greeley the bread, but before he could possibly do so
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the great editor reached with his fork nearly across the table and harpooned a slice from a full plate.
"How do you take your tea, Mr. Greeley?" the hostess asked.
"Thank you, I don't take any," he replied.
"What, then, will you have to drink?" Mrs. Cochran asked.
"A cup of hot water with milk and sugar-and plenty of milk," he answered. "I left off tea a long time ago and have not taken coffee in thirty years," the great man said. "If I hadn't I know I could not have done the work I have ; nor would my hand be as steady as it is."
"You don't mean to say," said the host, "that your hand doesn't shake any?"
"It does not!" Mr. Greeley declared most emphatically.
Just then noticing that his chief guest had finished his bread, Mr. Cochran put out his hand to pass him some more, but Mr. Greeley with his dexterous fork and long arm again forestalled him.
Seated in the parlor, after the meal-
"Mr. Greeley," the host said, "where do you live now, if it's a fair"-but before the question was fairly put-
"I cannot be said to live anywhere!" he answered. "My wife has been an invalid for many years and for six years has been in different parts of the world, seeking the most congenial atmosphere for her lungs-the West In- dies, Florida, England, France, Italy, etc."
"Mr. Greeley," one of the company said, "I heard you twenty years ago at a teachers' institute at Somerville."
"Oh, yes," he replied, "I used to come to Somerville quite often thirty years ago, or perhaps nearer forty years,
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it'll be! I married my wife in Somerset County. She taught school near Lamington."
A man who attended Mr. Greeley's lecture said he was a much larger and finer looking man than he expected ; and he noticed no oddity about him, except that one leg of his pantaloons only reached to the top of his shoes. On the drink question Mr. Greeley took the position that al- cohol is poison.
"Don't take poison into your system," he said. "You don't take strychnine, nor arsenic, nor corrosive sublimate. Then don't take alcohol, either!"
"There are two things for temperance folks to do," he continued. "First, men are ignorant of the true char- acter of this poison and you must teach them. Second, they won't know and believe and you must persuade them. There are thousands wilfully blind," he said, "as was the man who got up before daylight to do his fall killing. A hog was nicely dressed before breakfast, and he 'hadn't had fresh pork in so long' he must eat a pound or two to breakfast. At dinner, spare-rib and pluck of course made the meal. For supper his good wife thought something lighter would do; but no, he 'hadn't had fresh pork in so long' he must have some for supper, too. All went well so far, and about 9 o'clock he topped off with a couple of baked apples and went to bed.
"In the night he had-as he richly deserved-a violent attack of cholera morbus, from which he just escaped with his life. His comment was: 'Well, it was them baked apples that like to have killed me. I'll never eat any more baked apples!'
"So kidney complaints, inflammations, nervous weak-
"For God's sake, madam, what are you doing to the poor child?" the physician shouted.
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nesses and a thousand other ailments are all mysterious visitations of Providence. No, they ain't" the lecturer shouted. "They are far oftener visitations of rum!"
The lecturer held the close attention of his audience for an hour and a half. In his delivery there was fre- quent hesitation, or waiting for the right word, my in- formant says, which in one so used to public speaking seemed remarkable. But that the thoughts and deduc- tions were worthy of the great and good man that de- livered them was the unanimous conclusion of his hearers.
At breakfast, next morning, allusion was made to the unveiling of Franklin's statue, which was to take place that same day, January 17, 1872, in Printing House Square, in New York. Of this Mr. Greeley remarked :
"As a member of the press I must be there. I don't mind that; but the dinner after it is the trouble-I hate public dinners!" he said.
On the twenty-ninth of November of the same year Horace Greeley was dead; just thirty days after the death of his wife. She died on the thirtieth of October.
A LEGEND OF PLUCKEMIN.
THEIR TRYSTING PLACE ON ECHO LAKE SAW THE DEATH OF THE INDIAN MAIDEN, WINONA, AND HER LOVER.
The visitor to Pluckemin would miss its most roman- tic attraction should he fail to see Echo Lake with its Buttermilk Falls. This charming spot is at the base of the northern termination of the First Watchung Mountain, between which and the Second Mountain is the notch opening into Washington Valley. The limpid little lake received its name doubtless on account of its remarkable manipulation of sounds; for through some peculiar acoustics of the beetling mountain brow, with its shelving and perpendicular rocks on one side, and the dim, cloister-like windings of the other shore, from certain points the human voice is echoed and re-echoed as many as seven distinct times.
As might be expected, this spot has traditions of its own, some of them of Indian origin. The same never- failing spring, which, on account of its healing virtues the red men came from afar to drink, still gushes from their old Father Watchung's side into Echo Lake and is today tapped at what is known as the Culm Rock Spring. Nor were the Indians free from superstitious beliefs in the wonderful curative effects of its outward application, when made with certain forms and ceremonies, one es. pecial virtue being its supposed power to quench the pangs of misplaced or slighted love.
One legend bearing on this property of the waters to
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the Indian mind has it that Cannackanuck, one of the last Raritan Kings, was grievously weighed down with trouble, in that his beautiful and only daughter, Winona, loved Thingerawso, an inferior chief of their own, the Delaware nation.
"Thingerawso shall never wed thee, my daughter," the King said. "That he is a comely youth and well favored, I grant; but he is not of thy station. It cannot be. Of this distemper thou shalt be relieved. For by advice of my faithful medicine man we shall journey into the wholesome land of the persimmon and thou shalt par- take of the cooling waters that flow from old Father Watchung's bounteous springs, and peradventure thou may'st be restored to salubrious sanity. Up, let thy maidens make ready, for to-morrow at sunrise we shall set out."
With a bodyguard of threescore braves the King next day moved his family and court to the Watchung Moun- tain top, overlooking Echo Lake, and encamped there. Each morning Winona and her favorite maid descended the mountain and according to the medicine man's pre- scription the King's daughter, strewing persimmon leaves on the surface, lifted water from a spring in a natural cup in the rock with her hand and drank, uttering a short incantation between each sip and turning her face to the east.
"I thus perform my hard task, my Senseta, as you see, faithfully," Winona said to her maid, "because my revered father wishes that in this way I should renounce my own Thingerawso; but, alas! the purpose is at war with my heart, for I only love him still the more."
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Meantime the King, who seemed to have had the royal instinct of matchmaking, came home from the hunt one day with a handsome young brave, whom he had casually met in the chase, and presented him to Winona and her mother as Connosota, the warlike son of Unawanda, a powerful Seneca chief of the Mengwe nation, beyond the Delaware. The elder woman directed a startled glance of inquiry at her husband, which he perfectly understood and answered, by announcing that their guest's puissant father, though wielding the highest power among a people not over friendly to the Delaware nation, yet was a tried and true friend of the Raritan Kings.
"Therefore I do truly delight to honor his son," the King said, and filling two richly chased horns from a little rill that trickled from a fissure in the high rock that formed a side of the wigwam, and handing one to his guest : "Let us drink," said he, "from Father Watchung's unequaled vintage to the health and unending glory of thy right noble sire."
The young chief and his company were lodged in one of the State wigwams, and had such distinguished enter- tainment that they stayed many days and were frequently joined by the King in their hunts along the North Branch River. The young man's presence there was really brought about by the King's special and pressing invita- tion, who judged that the presence of so princely a youth might aid in his design of turning the unfortunate current of his daughter's thoughts from Thingerawso, even better perhaps than his medicine man's prescription could ; and, further, such a union would go a long way to cement the
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friendship which he so much desired with the powerful and domineering Mengwe tribesmen.
Meanwhile Thingerawso, being a fearless and adven- turous young chief, and fully assured of Winona's love for him, he let no opportunity slip of meeting her. Hav- ing learned of her enforced observances at Echo Lake, he soon gained the connivance of her maid to his beloved spending some precious time each day in his company. To this end a trysting place was arranged between the lovers, which was at the top of a high rock that rose prone from Echo Lake on the south side. The same rock is there still, but considerably lower, and whereas its top is now shaley, with only a few scrub oaks around, at the time mentioned it had a fort-like crown embowered by stately forest trees, wherefrom a lovely view was obtained of the opposite shore and the lake beneath. Here the fair Winona and her cruelly forbidden lover met almost daily and basked in the sunshine of each others smiles. This was until the coming of Connosota. After that event, as the young guest plainly showed a deep interest in the beautiful girl, by her father's directions her visits to the lake were fewer and of shorter duration and soon termin- ated altogether. So that Winona's Rock, as their meeting place was ever afterward known, often had now the dis- consolate Thingerawso waiting alone and lingering long for his love in vain.
It was not long before the impetuous guest asked the King and was readily promised his daughter in marriage. Then was Winona in great tribulation, for she could no longer go to the lake at all, but was continually called upon to contribute to the entertainment of their guest,
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who though of fine manly form and martial bearing, had the proud and somewhat contemptuous manner invariably in vogue among the Mengwe toward all the Delawares without exception. She was not consulted, however, and had to take part even in rejoicings over her betrothal to one man while passionately in love with another. Every day now she felt unspeakable woe to think of her true lover vainly waiting and watching for her coming, and having to go away without a word of explanation and perhaps doubting her fidelity.
At last, on the brink of despair, one day when her father and his guest were again in the hunting field, Winona contrived a meeting with her lover. Nothing, she told him wringing her hands in anguish, could now rescue her from the detested Seneca chief's son, but his death.
"Would that I could meet him in single combat. I would lower his proud crest or perish in the attempt!" exclaimed her lover.
"Thou shalt meet him, my brave Thingerawso! To- morrow an opportunity shall be given thee to prove thy love in prowess and to rid me of this insufferable burden." Then shading her lustrous brown eyes with her hand in hurried scrutiny that they were unobserved, in a tense whisper she unfolded her plot. On the morrow, she told him, she would lure Connosota to come to the spot where they then stood, on Winona's Rock. "And," said she fer- vently clasping her hands and looking upward, "may the Great Spirit deliver this, our mortal enemy, into thine hand !"
She further explained that the exact hour when her
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lover might expect his victim was beyond her power to name, but just as he should start out to see her favorite seat, which short pilgrimage she would exact of him in proof of his devotion-then she would spill milk into the stream that ran near their camp and which fed the falls. "Therefore," she said, "let my beloved Thingerawso tarry by the falling waters and what time they turn white, even with the milk, then may'st thou walk straight to the rock here and find the enemy who must be slain and cast over the precipice into the lake, to the end that thou and I shall be made happy."
Next day at the prearranged signal, when Thingerawso saw the water running over the falls white with milk, knitting his brows and clenching his teeth, he made for the place of deadly tryst. Arriving at the spot, there, gazing at the fair scene, in obedience to his enforced be- trothed, stood Connosota. Grasping his tomahawk in a hand of iron the Delaware swooped down the slope.
"Death to the miscreant! Thingerawso, a Delaware chief, decrees it!" Thingerawso shouted, and swung his weapon to dash out his enemy's brains. But quick as thought the wily Connosota whipped something from un- der his cloak that no Delaware had ever heard of, and shot the advancing chief with a white man's pistol. Thingerawso fell, calling Winona's name, and by his own impetus rolled over the cliff, a dead man, into the lake below.
From the mountain top the waiting Winona ran to meet her lover, though terrified at the awful sound of the unknown firearm, which she mistook for thunder and which echoed and re-echoed, not seven but seemingly sev-
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· enty times seven times among the mountains and distant hills. She ran on until she reached the fatal rock, where she had promised to meet her victorious lover and had likewise but faithlessly promised to meet Connosota, neither wishing nor expecting to see him again alive. But, alas! there stood, not the man she loved, but her hated betrothed, with a ghastly stream of blood beneath her feet; whose blood! Pointing dramactically at the tell- tale gore:
"What hast thou done, oh, murderous Mengwe?" she screamed, on the point, as it seemed, of flying at his throat like a lioness robbed of her whelps.
"I have slain the cut-throat Delaware, Thingerawso," he answered. "That is his blood; be it upon his own head ; his body is there," and he pointed to the lake.
Speechless she passed him, and peering over the cliff saw the dear dead face she loved so well in the water far below. So near was she to the brink of the dizzy preci- pice that Connosota, brave man as he was, covered his eyes and called in abject fear for her :
"Winona! Oh, Winona!" But she neither heeded or heard him.
As she gazed down in rapt agony, the dead face sank out of sight just as weird, answering echoes came back over the water, calling pathetically, "Winona! Win- ona!"
"Thou callest me, my love," she said with a smile of sweet contentment, "and I come to thee!" and she plung- ed over the precipice to death with her lover.
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Thingerawso fell, calling Winona's name,
A NIGHT OF TERROR.
THINGS SEEN AND HEARD BY "DICK" LOUD IN THE SO- CALLED HAUNTED INN AT CHERRYVILLE.
Things left undone that we ought to have done are often brought home to us in this sublunary sphere. It ought to have been and was intended, but forgotten, to be mentioned in my last article, that I was indebted to two aged men for the bulk of what was said about the old Cherryville tavern, namely, to J. Rutsen Schenck, of Clover Hill, and old Garret Docherty, the constable, of Montgomery. The latter, who gave me much of the data, I regret now to learn, died several days ago. In fact he seems to have told me his story and died almost with the last words of it upon his lips.
Long before he became a constable himself, "Gat" even as a boy took great interest in the tales of men who had grown old and gray in that office. One of these, Constable Durham, had a seemingly inexhaustible fund of story about all sorts of queer things in his own and others' experience. Among many other stories he told "Gat" about some happenings of a ghostly kind at the Cherryville tavern, while it stood empty, after old "Abe" Skinner's somewhat dramatic end there.
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