in the best English fashion, a lawn between the eastern
front and the Albany post-road. He it was who married Joanna, daughter
of Governor Anthony Brockholst, of a very ancient family of
Lancashire, England; and who left provision for the founding of St.
John's Church, across the Neperan from the manor-house, and for the
endowment of the glebe thereof. And in his long time the manor-house
flourished and grew venerable and multiplied its associations. He had
five children: Frederick (Elizabeth's father), Philip, Susannah, Mary
(the beauty, wooed of Washington in 1756, 'tis said, and later wed by
Captain Roger Morris), and Margaret; and, at this manor-house alone,
white servants thirty, and black servants twenty; and a numerous
tenantry, happy because in many cases the yearly rent was but nominal,
being three or four pounds or a pair of hens or a day's work,--for the
Philipses, thanks to trade and to office-holding under the Crown, and
to the beneficent rule whereby money multiplies itself, did not have
to squeeze a living out of the tillers of their land. The lord of the
manor held court leet and baron at the house of a tenant, and
sometimes even inflicted capital punishment.

In 1751, the second lord followed his grandfather to the family vault
in Sleepy Hollow Church. With the accession of Elizabeth's father,
then thirty-one years old, began the splendid period of the mansion;
then the panorama of which it was both witness and setting wore its
most diverse colors. The old contest between English and French on
this continent was approaching its glorious climax. Whether they were
French emissaries coming down from Quebec, by the Hudson or by horse,
or English and colonial officers going up from New York in command of
troops, they must needs stop and pay their respects to the lord of the
manor of Philipsburgh, and drink his wine, and eat his venison, and
flirt with his stunning sisters. Soldiers would go from New York by
the post-road to Philipsburgh, and then embark at the little landing,
to proceed up the Hudson, on the way to be scalped by the red allies
of the French or mowed down by Montcalm's gunners before impregnable
Ticonderoga. Many were the comings and goings of the scarlet coat and
green. The Indian, too, was still sufficiently plentiful to contribute
much to the environing picturesqueness. But, most of all, in those
days, the mansion got its character from the festivities devised by
its own inmates for the e