Jersey, as he could find temporary work, or as he took the whim. Five or six generations of his descendants were scattered along through the mountains (the old man counted them last at one hundred and sixty-five) but they were all poor, and he was still homeless and thriftless. His one steady idea seemed to be to get a pension, as he had served six years in the revolutionary army, and had been in the battle of Monmouth and the battle of Stony Point, and was wounded at Monmouth. The difficulty lay in his having left the army "without any writing to show for it," though he did it to work in the mountain forge, back of West Point, where he was a journeyman when the war begun, and where he was sent for again, to help cast cannon balls for the army. I was interested in the story, as Torrey's hammer emphasized it on the heels of my mare, and promised to give the old man a kind welcome when he should come.
One bright morning, accordingly, his name was sent up to me. Torrey had been too busy to leave his shop, but another of my village cronies, Chatfield, the tanner, had undertaken to show the old man the way. He sat in the library, when I went in, directly under a bust of venerable Tasso—a closely-shaved and pinched-faced little old man, under a heavily-bearded old patriarch—and my first thought, I must own, was a wonder that so beautiful and needful a drapery, for the features of age, could ever be refused its
