tensions have been made with a discreet regard for the nucleus. A very credible family tradition asserts that Lord Cornwallis once lodged and slept here, when he was in command of East Jersey. This is much the oldest and much the most interesting house in Bergen, and the only one that goes back to the days before New Jersey received that name from its English acquirers. The history of none of the several other old houses can be traced so accurately, house-building not being a subject of chronicle in county or parish registers; but the next oldest house in appearance, also on Bergen Avenue, is gambrel-roofed; and, although I speak under correction of the antiquaries who lie in ambush for the rash generalizations of the magazine-writer, I think the gambrel roof, wherever it is found in the Middle States, is of Yankee, or, at any rate, of English, origin. You remember Dr. Holmes's derivation:
"Gambrel?" "Gambrel?" Let me beg
You'll look at a horse's hinder leg:
First great angle above the hoof,—
That's the gambrel; hence gambrel roof.
Now, the Dutch roof is either one straight slope from ridge to eaves, or, if it has two, the lower is the flatter.
The most ancient relics of an old American village are commonly to be looked for in the church-yard. The grave-yard of Bergen was a church-yard, though it is so no longer, the pulling down of the existing church having been twice—once in 1764 and once in 1841—the accompaniment of building the new one. But the antiquities of Bergen are not to be found here. A slab of New Jersey sandstone, three inches thick, set on edge, is even more precarious as a memorial to posterity of the virtues of the dead than as the veneer which makes a brown-stone front. Even the founders of Bergen, though longevous, were mortal, and many of them died and were buried here before 1700. Yet the oldest inscription decipherable scarcely antedates the Revolution. Here it is:
Hier Leyt Begraaven Het
Lichaem Van Cornelius
Blinkerhoff Sone Van
Harmann and Clairsin
Blinkerhoff Gebooren den 14
Sept. 1745 En Overleden
September 1772.
This seems a late day for Dutch. But Dutch survived in one of the two sermons a Sunday preached in Bergen church, as the speech "understanded of the people," until well within this century, and, as we see in other inscriptions, was the language of epitaphs at least until 1810,—perhaps continued for commemoration after it had ceased to be vernacular, as the good Dr. Johnson "would never consent to disgrace the walls of Westminster Abbey with an English inscription." The fanciful Irving asserts that in his time the Bergen schoolmaster's "reading of a Low-Dutch psalm had much the same effect on the nerves as the filing of a handsaw." Here is the latest of these inscriptions in the Bergen grave-yard:
Hier Rust
het Lichaeme
Van
NESYE
Huysvrouwe Van Johannes
Van Wagenen
Overleden den 24 May
1810 Ouat Zynde 87 Yaaren 8
Maanden 11 Daagen.
There is one distinction between this country church-yard and that of Stoke-Pogis, or any in which the rude forefathers of an English hamlet sleep: the "holy text" and the "uncouth rhymes" are lacking. "Their name, their years," are spelled by a muse very slightly imbued with letters, and the frail memorial is decked with "shapeless sculpture." The double-chinned cherub which adorns the epitaph of Cornelius Blinkerhoff is unmistakably of Batavian origin.
From the time when "the maize-land behind Coramunipaw" became part of New Jersey, the sceptre passed from
