en-passant

Updated: May 13, 2025

"Before the war, and even while it existed, although I was eight years from home at one stretch, except the en-passant visits made to it on my marches to and from the siege of Yorktown, I made considerable additions to my dwellinghouse, and alterations in my offices and gardens; but the dilapidation occasioned by time, and those neglects which are coextensive with the absence of proprietors, have occupied as much of my time within the last twelve months, in repairing them, as at any former period in the same space; and it is a matter of sore regret, when I cast my eyes toward Belvoir, which I often do, to reflect that the former inhabitants of it, with whom we lived in such harmony and friendship, no longer reside there, and that the ruins can only be viewed as the memento of former pleasures."

Benson John Lossing - Washington and the American Republic, Vol. 3.