own hand, courtesies extended to him and to his lady by a member of the
Morris family, being especially interesting. Up-stairs, in the sunlit
hall, among other treasures, more elegant but not more interesting,
hangs a sunbonnet once worn by Molly Stark herself.

Not far off down the country road is perhaps the most beautiful and
attractive spot in the whole town, the old family burying-ground of the
Starks, in which are interred all the deceased members of this
remarkable family, from the Revolutionary Major Caleb and his wife down.
Here, with grim, towering Kearsarge standing ever like a sentinel,
rests under the yew-trees the dust of this great family's honoured
dead.

A SOLDIER OF FORTUNE

"The only time I ever heard Washington swear," Lafayette once remarked,
"was when he called General Charles Lee a 'damned poltroon,' after the
arrest of that officer for treasonable conduct." Nor was Washington the
only person of self-restraint and good manners whose temper and angry
passions were roused by this same erratic General Lee.

Lee was an Englishman, born in Cheshire in 1731. He entered the British
army at the age of eleven years, was in Braddock's expedition, and was
wounded at Ticonderoga in 1758. He also served for a time in Portugal,
but certain infelicities of temper hindered his advancement, and he
never rose higher in the British service than a half-pay major. As a
"soldier of fortune" he was vastly more successful. In all the pages of
American history, indeed, it would be difficult to find anybody whose
career was more interestingly and picturesquely checkered than was his.

Lee's purpose in coming to America has never been fully explained. There
are concerning this, as every other step of his career, two
diametrically opposed opinions. The American historians have for the
most agreed in thinking him traitorous and self-seeking, but for my own
part I find little to justify this belief, for I have no difficulty
whatever in accounting for his soldierly vagaries on the score of his
temperament, and the peculiar conditions of his early life. A man who,
while still a youth, was adopted by the Mohawk Indians,--who who
bestowed upon him the significant name of Boiling Water,--who was at one
time aid-de-camp and intimate friend of the King of Poland, who rendered
good service in the Russian war against the Turks,--all before
interesting himself at all in the cause of American freedom,--could
scarcely be expe