Tories. With admirable calmness Mrs. Caldwell told the stranger to follow her and led him out by an opposite door. A large locust tree stood close by and the night was so dark that no object could be discerned amid its clustering foliage. She urged the man to climb the tree and conceal himself till the intruders should be absorbed in plundering her house. He could then descend on the other side and trust to the darkness for his safety. The house was pillaged, as she expected, and the man bearing the message so important to his country escaped, to remember with gratitude the woman whose prudence had saved him while undergoing the loss of her own property.
Another little incident, not without humor, illustrates how a woman's intrepidity was sometimes successful in disbanding marauders. Among such articles as the housewife so prizes, Mrs. Caldwell had an elegant tablecloth, which she valued as the gift of her mother. While the Tories on one occasion were in her house gathering plunder, one of them broke open the chest of drawers which contained it and tore out the tablecloth. Mrs. Caldwell seized and held it fast, determined not to give up her treasure. When she found that her rapacious enemy would soon succeed in wresting it from her unless she could make use of something more than muscular force to prevent him, she turned to the other men of the party and appealed to them with all a woman's eloquence, asking if some of them had not wives or daughters for whose sake they would interfere. A small man who stood at the distance of a few feet presently stepped up and with tears in his eyes said that he had a wife, and a fine little woman she was too, and that he would not allow any rudeness to be practiced toward Mrs. Caldwell. His interference compelled the depredator to restore the valued article, and then the tide of opinion turned, and the British soldiers cheered lustily for courageous Rachel Caldwell. After the war Doctor Caldwell resumed his labors as teacher and preacher. He died in the summer of 1824, in the one hundredth year of his age. The wife who had accompanied him in all the vicissitudes of his long life followed him to the grave at the age of eighty-eight. All who knew Rachel Caldwell regarded her as a woman of remarkable character and interest and she is remembered throughout her state with high respect.
CORNELIA BEEKMAN.
In the venerable Van Cortlandt mansion, the old-fashioned stone house erected upon the banks of the Croton River many years previous to the Revolution, Cornelia, the second daughter of Peter Van Cortlandt and Johanna, was born in 1752. Peter Van Cortlandt was Lieutenant-Governor of the state of New York under George Clinton from 1777 to 1795, and was distinguished for his zealous maintenance of American rights. His daughter inherited the principles to which in after
