CONTENTS FOOTNOTES TRANSCRIBER'S NOTE

The Belle of Bowling Green

By AMELIA E. BARR

Author of “The Bow of Orange Ribbon;” “The Maid of Maiden Lane,” Etc.

With Illustrations By WALTER H. EVERETT

A. L. BURT COMPANY, PUBLISHERS, NEW YORK

Copyright, 1904, BY Dodd, Mead & Company

Published, October

PRINTED IN NEW YORK, U. S. A.

To My Friend

WARREN SNYDER

A Bookman and a Lover of Books

This Novel is Dedicated

CONTENTS

Prologue

The Belle of Bowling Green

CHAPTER ONE Monday’s Daughters

VERY city has some locality to which its heroic and civic memories especially cling; and this locality in the city of New York is the historic acre of the Bowling Green. With that spot it has been throughout its existence, in some way or other, unfailingly linked; and its mingled story of camp and court and domestic life ought to make the Bowling Green to the citizens of New York all that the Palladium was to the citizens of ancient Troy. For as the Palladium held in one hand a pike, and in the other hand a distaff and spindle, so also, the story of the Bowling Green is one of the pike and the distaff. It has felt the tread of fighting men, and the light feet of happy maidens; and though showing a front of cannon, has lain for nearly three centuries at the open seaward door of the city, like a green hearthstone of welcome.

In the closing years of the eighteenth, and the early years of the nineteenth century, the Bowling Green was in a large measure surrounded by the stately homes of the most honourable and wealthy citizens; and though this class, before the war of 1812, had began to move slowly northward, it was some years later a very aristocratic quarter, especially favoured by the rich families of Dutch extraction, who, having dwelt for many generations somewhere around the Fort and the Bowling Green, were not easily induced to relinquish their homes in a locality so familiar and so dear to them.

Thus for nearly one hundred and forty years there had been Bloommaerts living in the old Beaver Path, and in Bloommaert’s Valley, or Broad Street, and when Judge Gerardus Bloommaert, in 1790, built himself a handsome dwelling, he desired no finer site for it than the Bowling Green. It was a lofty, roomy house of red brick, without extraneous ornament, but realising in its interior arrangements and furnishings the highest ideals of household comfort and elegance.

Sapphira, his only daughter, a girl of eighteen years old, was, however, its chief charm and attraction. No painting on all its walls could rival her living beauty; and many a young citizen found the road to the Custom House the road of his desire. For was there not always the hope that he might catch a glimpse of the lovely Sapphira at the window of her home? Or meet her walking on the Mall, or the Battery, and perhaps, if very fortunate, get a smile or a word from her in passing.

All knew that they could give themselves good reasons for their devotions; they did not bow to an unworthy idol. Sapphira Bloommaert had to perfection every mystery and beauty of the flesh—dark, lambent eyes, hardly more lambent than the luminous face lighted up by the spirit behind it; nut-brown hair, with brows and long eyelashes of a still darker shade; a vivid complexion; an exquisite mouth; a tall, erect, slender form with a rather proud carriage, and movements that were naturally of superb dignity: “the airs of a queen,” as her cousin Annette said. But Sapphira had no consciousness in this attitude; it was as natural as breathing to her; and was the result of a perfectly harmonious physical and moral beauty, developed under circumstances of love and happiness. All her life days had been full of content; she looked as if she had been born smiling.

This was exactly what her grandmother Bloommaert said to her one morning, and that with some irritation; for the elder woman was anxious about many people and many things, and Sapphira’s expression of pleasant contentment was not the kind of sympathy that worry finds soothing.

“In trouble is the city, Sapphira, and over that bit of hair-work you sit smiling, as if in Paradise we were. I think, indeed, you were born smiling.”

“The time of tears is not yet, grandmother; when it comes, I shall weep—like other women.”

“Weep! Yes, yes; but one thing remember—deliverance comes never through tears. Look at Cornelia Desbrosses; dying she is, with her own tears poisoned.”

“I am sorry for Cornelia; I wish that she had no cause to weep,” and with these words she did not smile. It had suddenly struck her that perhaps it was not right or kind to be happy when there was so much fear and anxiety in her native city. The idea was new and painful; she rose and went with it to the solitude of her own room; and her mother after silently watching her exit, said:

“She is so gentle, so easily moved—was it worth while?”

“You think so? Give Sapphira a motive strong enough, and so firm she will be—so impossible to move. Oh, yes, Carlita, I know!”

“Indeed, mother, she obeys as readily as a little child. Our will is her will. She bends to it just like the leaves of that tree to the wind.”