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Incidental to this, and only incidental, is the following: Shortly after I purchased my property, as I was very fond of calling my little farm, in Rensselaer County, I was in Albany one day when it occurred to me that I wanted a carpet for my parlor. I went to the store of a well-known carpet-dealer, and asked to be shown some of his goods.
There used to be in Albany, not many years ago, a miniature "Five Points," and one didn't have to go very far up what is now Rensselaer Street to find it, either. There were tenement houses, which from attic to basement swarmed with filthy, ragged, repulsive human life.
During dinner Ireland was easily triumphant, for while Katrine sat at Nicholas van Rensselaer's right, Dermott had been placed on her other side, and Frank, sitting by deaf old Mrs. van Rensselaer, had abundant time to mark McDermott's gift for society.
Van Rensselaer Livingstone! Why so it is! How perfectly delightful! I know him very well, Uncle Hutchinson.
He was a sharp trader, having made two voyages to the Hudson River in the interest of Van Rensselaer, but he knew nothing of governing a colony. The ship that brought the new Governor to the Island of Manhattan, had also on board a hundred soldiers, and these were the first soldiers ever sent to the island.
"Girls," said Dear Jones, "never go out in a row-boat at night with a young man unless you mean to accept him." "Sometimes it's best to refuse him, and get it over once for all," said Baby Van Rensselaer. "As Eliphalet took the oars he felt a sudden chill. He tried to shake it off, but in vain. He began to have a growing consciousness of impending evil.
An American regular brigade was on the march to Buffalo, but its commander, Brigadier General Alexander Smyth, was not subordinate to Van Rensselaer, and the two had quarreled. Smyth paid no attention to a request for a council of war and went his own way.
They therefore, on an appointed day assembled the freemen and householders who bound themselves, by an oath, "to maintain and support offensively and defensively the right and jurisdiction of the colony against every one." Among the persons who took this oath we find the name of John Baptist Van Rensselaer.
Somewhat more than a hundred years later, Benajah Douglass, a descendant of this pair and grandfather of the subject of this sketch, pushed still farther into the interior, and settled in Rensselaer County, in the province of New York.
General Smyth, a most incompetent man, who succeeded to the command of the American army on the resignation of Van Rensselaer, subsequently attempted to storm and carry Fort Erie, but Colonel Bisshopp successfully held this important post, which controlled the outlet of Lake Erie into the Niagara River.
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