her parents at present.

The close of the war did not bring Philip back to us at once. On that
day when, the last of the British vessels having gone down the bay,
with the last British soldier aboard, the strangely empty-looking town
took on a holiday humour, and General Washington rode in by the Bowery
lane, with a number of his officers, and a few war-worn troops to make
up a kind of procession of entry, and the stars and stripes were run
up at the Battery--on that day of sadness, humiliation, and
apprehension to those of us loyalists who had dared stay, I would have
felt like cheering with the crowd, had Philip been one of those who
entered. But he was still in the South, recovering from a bullet wound
in his shoulder.

My mother and I were thereafter the recipients of ominous looks, and
some uncomfortable hints and jeers, and our life was made constantly
unpleasant thereby. The sneers cast by one Major Wheeler upon us
loyalists, and upon our reasons for standing by the king, got me into
a duel with him at Weehawken, wherein I gave him the only wound he
ever received through his attachment to the cause of Independence.
Another such affair, which I had a short time afterward, near the
Bowery lane, and in which I shot a Captain Appleby's ear off, was
attributed by my mother to the same cause; but the real reason was
that the fellow had uttered an atrocious slander of Philip Winwood in
connection with the departure of Phil's wife. This was but one of the
many lies, on both sides of the ocean, that moved me at last to
attempt a true account of my friend's domestic trouble.

My mother foresaw my continual engagement in such affairs if we
remained in a place where we were subject to constant offence, and
declared she would become distracted unless we removed ourselves. I
resisted until she vowed she would go alone, if I drove her to that.
And then I yielded, with a heart enveloped in a dark mist as to the
outcome. Well, I thought with a sigh, I can always write to Fanny, and
some day I shall come back for her.

It was now Summer. One evening, I sat upon our front step, in a kind
of torpid state of mind through my refusal to contemplate the dismal
future. My eye turned listlessly down the street. The only moving
figure in it was that of a slender man approaching on the further side
of the way. He carried two valises, one with each hand, and leaned a
little forward as he strode, as if weary. Instantly I thought of years