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Updated: May 9, 2025
The walls were hung with mirrors, and thousands of wax tapers reflected the brilliance of silken gowns and jewels, of scarlet and gold uniforms, of fair women and brave men that made the Mischianza a glittering page of history. It was true that many beside the Tory ladies graced the occasion.
Is the power to hate to the death fading out? and are we the better for this? It may be so. Think of the weary months in jail, of starvation, insult, and the miseries of cold, raggedness, filth, and fever. Think, too, of my father set against me, of the Mischianza business, but for that I blame him not, and, last, of his involving me in the vile net of Arnold's treason.
"'The Mischianza, as 't is styled; Tibbie, began at four o clock in the afternoon with a grand regatta, all the galleys and flatboats being covered with awnings and dressed out with colours and streamers, making a most elegant spectacle. The embarkation took place at the upper end of the city, mommy and I entering the 'Hussar' which bore Sir William Howe.
I'll whistle a gay Irish jig, such as the men used in Howe's time at the King of Prussia Inn, while their betters were footing it to good British music. Think of the solemn drumbeat there will be at Yorktown! No gay Mischianza there! What a march it will be to the haughty prisoners!"
So, on May 18, 1778, at Philadelphia there was a farewell to Howe, which took the form of a Mischianza, something approaching the medieval tournament. Knights broke lances in honor of fair ladies, there were arches and flowers and fancy costumes, and high-flown Latin and French, all in praise of the departing Howe.
He put in the whole day studying the positions of our troops, and in the evening was a guest at the Mischianza André gave him a card, I heard and danced there with your daughter. I doubted the man from our first meeting, and later picked up certain rumors which convinced me he was a spy. Some words passed between us on the dancing floor, and as a consequence I asked the man to meet me below.
Hastings ever since the September day when the English army entered Philadelphia. He had been unfailingly kind to all the family, and when he offered to take Betty to Walnut Grove to see the preparations already well under way for the "Mischianza," as the soldiers named their famous entertainment to be given in honor of General Howe, Mrs. Hastings was quite willing for Betty to go.
A month before Janice would probably have been moved to tears at the discovery that her "elegant and dashy robing," as well as her Mischianza costume, had been stolen, but now she scarcely gave either of them a thought, so grateful was she merely to feel that they were safe from violence and insult.
A poor army drab, left behind in the evacuation, had been decked out in what Janice instantly recognised as her Mischianza costume; and with hair dressed so that it stood up not less than two feet above her forehead, splashed over with white paint, a drink-coloured face, doubly red in contrast, and bare feet, with an expanse of more than ankle in a similar nakedness below the trousers, she made up in all a figure so droll that under any other circumstances Janice would have laughed.
She set out at the time when poor André was making his preparations for the still longer journey whence he was nevermore to return the brilliant young officer with whom she had danced at the great fête, the "Mischianza," given by the British army to Sir William Howe only two years before in Philadelphia the gay man of fashion who had written versicles in her honor, and whose graceful pen-portrait of the fair girl is still in the possession of the Shippen family her thickly-powdered hair drawn up into a tower above her forehead and bedecked with ribbons and strings of pearls in the fashion then newly imported out of France, the last modish freak of Marie Antoinette before she laid her own stately head under the axe of the guillotine.
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