Afghanistan and the Anglo-Russian Dispute | Page 3

the war of the revolution, and had seen some
service in the shipping of that period. Among other scenes he witnessed,
he had been on board the Trumbull, in her action with the Watt--the
hardest-fought naval combat of that war--and he particularly delighted
in relating its incidents. He had been wounded in the battle, and bore
the marks of the injury, in a scar that slightly disfigured a face, that,
without this blemish, would have been singularly handsome. My

mother, after my poor father's death, always spoke of even this scar as a
beauty spot. Agreeably to my own recollections, the mark scarcely
deserved that commendation, as it gave one side of the face a grim and
fierce appearance, particularly when its owner was displeased.
My father died on the farm on which he was born, and which
descended to him from his great-grandfather, an English emigrant that
had purchased it of the Dutch colonist who had originally cleared it
from the woods. The place was called Clawbonny, which some said
was good Dutch others bad Dutch; and, now and then, a person
ventured a conjecture that it might be Indian. Bonny it was, in one
sense at least, for a lovelier farm there is not on the whole of the wide
surface of the Empire State. What does not always happen in this
wicked, world, it was as good as it was handsome. It consisted of three
hundred and seventy-two acres of first-rate land, either arable, or of
rich river bottom in meadows, and of more than a hundred of rocky
mountain side, that was very tolerably covered with wood. The first of
our family who owned the place had built a substantial one-story stone
house, that bears the date of 1707 on one of its gables; and to which
each of his successors had added a little, until the whole structure got to
resemble a cluster of cottages thrown together without the least
attention to order or regularity. There were a porch, a front door, and a
lawn, however; the latter containing half a dozen acres of a soil as
black as one's hat, and nourishing eight or ten elms that were scattered
about, as if their seeds had been sown broad-cast. In addition to the
trees, and a suitable garniture of shrubbery, this lawn was coated with a
sward that, in the proper seasons, rivalled all I have read, or imagined,
of the emerald and shorn slopes of the Swiss valleys.
Clawbonny, while it had all the appearance of being the residence of an
affluent agriculturist, had none of the pretension of these later times.
The house had an air of substantial comfort without, an appearance that
its interior in no manner contradicted. The ceilings, were low, it is true,
nor were the rooms particularly large; but the latter were warm in
winter, cool in summer and tidy, neat and respectable all the year round.
Both the parlours had carpets, as had the passages and all the better
bed-rooms; and there were an old-fashioned chintz settee, well stuffed

and cushioned, and curtains in the "big parlour," as we called the best
apartment,--the pretending name of drawing-room not having reached
our valley as far back as the year 1796, or that in which my
recollections of the place, as it then existed, are the most vivid and
distinct.
We had orchards, meadows, and ploughed fields all around us; while
the barns, granaries, styes, and other buildings of the farm, were of
solid stone, like the dwelling, and all in capital condition. In addition to
the place, which he inherited from my grandfather, quite without any
encumbrance, well stocked and supplied with utensils of all sorts, my
father had managed to bring with him from sea some fourteen or fifteen
thousand dollars, which he carefully invested in mortgages in the
county. He got twenty-seven hundred pounds currency with my mother,
similarly bestowed; and, two or three great landed proprietors, and as
many retired merchants from York, excepted, Captain Wallingford was
generally supposed to be one of the stiffest men in Ulster county. I do
not know exactly how true was this report; though I never saw anything
but the abundance of a better sort of American farm under the paternal
roof, and I know that the poor were never sent away empty-handed. It
as true that our wine was made of currants; but it was delicious, and
there was always a sufficient stock in the cellar to enable us to drink it
three or four years old. My father, however, had a small private
collection of his own, out of which he would occasionally produce a
bottle; and I remember to have heard Governor George Clinton,
afterwards, Vice President, who was an Ulster county man, and who
sometimes stopped at Clawbonny