The attachment of the parents to the young is very great, when the latter are yet of a small size… But as the young advance, and, after being able to take wing and provide for themselves, are not disposed to fly off, the old birds turn them out, and beat them away from them. Here, some advice from an old man, or older-for I am almost eighty years of age and have lived hand-to-mouth for sixty of them. Have no more children.

But you are a devil, far too subtle and secret for one of your position, and I expect you will go on living as you wish or as chance will wish for you.

Taking into account your note of the present unreliability of the American currency, I am shipping the specie, insuring it as you have required.

Monsieur

WE BOUGHT OUR FARM out along the Bloomingdale Road, although when I say farm I do not mean anything like Hoagland's but rather a collection of gorges and wooded hills on the banks of the Hudson River some three miles south of Harlem Heights. In addition to the ancient wonder of the Hudson we had one very serviceable stream which we were told was called Ratskill but which we renamed Pleasant Creek, which indeed it was.

It was here, in the haze of a summer afternoon, where the eye found itself sunk into humid jungly greens, that Mathilde was once more endeavoring to prepare a canvas from whose heart would glow the light that was everywhere around us. She was in the upstairs studio with a velvet curtain hung to keep dust away from the colorists-three girls who were busy with their birds in the same long room. The correct preparation of a canvas was a continual bane to my extraordinary darling, and I had lived with her through the days of chalk, half chalk, oil, even graphite. This was sometimes an agony to us both, although I was generally, as they say of husbands, good.

On this particular day she was at it with a pumice stone, abrading a surface she had earlier sized with glove paring. After this there would be more lead white, then the never-ending pumice, and who knew if this would ever hold the light of this Indian summer afternoon? The light of this country was its greatest joy and burden.

Looking up from her furious attack on the glove parings, she spied a man proceeding toward Harlem along the dusty road. Immediately she stamped her foot three times on the floor, for she, who had once acted so rashly, was now in constant anxiety lest she be paid a little visit by insurance agents and their spies.

I came out my front door like the lord of the manor, which I was, even if our grand estate was all ravines and jungle, yellow clay, not a beast upon the place except a cart horse by the name of Biff. What came toward us was no insurance agent. Indeed, the creature was proceeding more in the manner of a beetle with a ball of dung, although this latter item turned out to be a very large trunk such as gentlemen are used to taking on their voyages.

I was very slow to understand the traveler was my Lord Migraine, his red face covered by clay dust, attempting to convey a burden which had already long defeated him. He shifted it from his left shoulder to his right, onto his back, now placed it down and rolled it with his hands, picked it up again and rested it on the rail of our little bridge.

I ran out to help him like the greatest lackey ever born, but when I arrived in front of him I was too embarrassed to say a word. I got his trunk onto my back, and without a single word of greeting, or any inquiry as to how he had got himself into such a state, I led him to our house.

I did not need to be an Oxford don to see his marriage prospects had gone up in flames, and of course my heart went out to the poor coot. Yet that common bodily organ is as complicated as a spinning jenny, and when he appeared before me in this way, with all his braid torn, and his bare skin showing through his hose, there was, God forgive me, a certain sinful joy in it. Of course I am not a heartless bastard. I was not gratified to glimpse his pain, but I suppose I was as full of myself as the next fellow, and I was just a little pleased that the posh shine had been knocked off him. In that moment, in the middle of a steamy afternoon, it seemed as if he had come to be with us, to be like us, to share our fortune. That made me happy. I should be thoroughly ashamed.

I seated him on our one good chair at table and Mathilde gave him tea and bread and butter and he ate three slices which was all we had. Maman already had a drum of water boiling (so she could scald and pluck an unlucky Canadian goose, shot while flying miles up in the sky), and this I commandeered and carried down beside the house and filled our tub and then brought it to a nice temperature with a little bit of Hudson. To this pretty spot I did then escort the poor human and he still uttered no sound other than a small cry as the water touched his feet which had broken blisters as rough and raw as orange peels.

There was a great pleasure in caring for him, and I was not alone in feeling it. Mrs. Watkins took the wagonette up to Harlem, to the inn, hoping to find good wine for her countryman, and Mathilde was already in his trunk, searching for clean items to replace those he had arrived in.

"He has no servant," she later whispered, so I knew what a mess his trunk must be and that he had been sent away from Wethersfield with no assistance in his packing.

I washed his hair and found it filled with grit and gravel and twigs, and so dirty it took three goes to have a lather rising, but when it was done I toweled his brainy noggin and his hair rose light and curly as an angel in a church.

"I thank you, Master Larrit," he said.

"You are welcome," I replied, although I did think a Mister would have gone down better on this particular occasion. I had a great and childish passion to tell him, I will look after you, to say, This is my own house, this is my own dear wife, this is my successful enterprise. Here you can stay safely and write whatever book you like.

He said, "I would be obliged if you could find a bed for me."

Mathilde's maman had heated her black iron and pressed him a shirt and there were now cleanish stockings and trousers available and so when he was decent I escorted him inside and up my stairs. You see, I thought, I have so many rooms. He must be gob-smacked.

"Just wait one moment," I said, and I left him standing in the upstairs hall while I asked two of the pretty little colorists if they would mind to share a bed that night, and of course they were happy to give up their mattress to a French noble. I came out and found the hallway empty. Then I heard his shoes fall and understood he had lain down in our room.

A moment later my former master was sound asleep. By the time I had brought Mathilde to see the sight, he was gently snoring. We stood together, she and I, my arm around her shoulder, the pair of us smiling like fools, as if he were our child. My dear father and his friends would have risen from their graves if they could have known, but Mathilde and I were proud and happy for him to rest awhile in such a large and handsome room-big windows open to the breezes from the Hudson and the walls holding aspects of the river, oil studies all of them, my darling's continual grappling with the fleeting colors of dawn and sunset, the clear clear light of noon, and the warm whiskey haze of this very afternoon.

Mathilde and I had shared many mattresses but this was our first bed, purchased from a family traveling north upon the road. Who had slept in it I was careful not to ask, but it was a bargain and very beautiful-ornate cast iron with a brass sun at its head and four moons, one at every post.

And here he now lay, our friend, our guest, Olivier-Jean-Baptiste de Clarel de Garmont, in our care and under our protection.