Waldo and Knox. The remaining shares General Knox succeeded in obtaining by purchase. To the cultivation and improvement of this estate he applied his whole energies immediately upon retiring from public life, and established his residence near the thriving village of Thomaston. Here he erected a spacious mansion, three stories in height, with corresponding out-buildings, all in the style of a French chateau. The mansion was situated on a swelling slope, sheltered by the forest in the rear, and commanding a magnificent view of ten miles down the Georges river, a river which is navigable for the largest ships. Although local tradition has greatly exaggerated the extent of this house, yet with its cupola, balconies and piazzas, added to the surrounding walks, well-kept lawns, tufted trees and shrubbery, the whole premises were unequalled for beauty and symmetry in New England. In dimensions, architecture and ornaments, the expansive character of the owner was clearly manifested.

"In this charming spot, to which he gave the name of Montpelier, in the society of his wife and children, and of the many distinguished visitors, who from time to time partook of his hospitality, Knox probably enjoyed a larger degree of happiness than he had ever before known." Mrs. Knox, who was truly his congenial spirit, was also well satisfied to exchange scenes of gayety and fashion for domestic life. She is described as having been, even in her latter days, when upward of sixty, a remarkably fine-looking woman, with brilliant black eyes, and a blooming complexion. Her mind, we are told, was of a high order, and her influence upon all with whom she came in contact was very decided. The deference of General and Mrs. Washington, and the homage paid to her intellectual superiority by many persons of talent and judgment, show this influence to have been great and well-founded. In society she was commanding, and gave a tone to the manners of the times. During the residence of General Knox at New York, their house was the scene of a liberal hospitality. Mr. Griswold, in his "Republican Court," says, "she was recognized as a lively and meddlesome, but amiable, leader of society, without whose co-operation it was believed by many beside herself that nothing could be properly done in the drawing-room, or the ball-room, or any place where fashionable men and women sought amusement."

During the residence of Knox at Montpelier, he constantly received guests from far and near, who came to make their obeisance of respect and regard to the warrior and patriot. Writing to his friend General Henry Jackson in 1795, he says, "We had a small company on the Fourth of July of upward of five hundred people!"* On this occasion, which was soon after his arrival, a general invitation had been given to all the surrounding inhabitants to partake of the festivities of an oldfashioned house-warming. Brilliant parties from Philadelphia and other cities, and frequently from abroad, enlivened the summer, and the halls resounded with music and conversation. At this time, America was the asylumn for many distinguished foreigners, driven here by the French Revolution. Among them. were Louis Philippe, afterward King of France, and his brothers, the Duke de Montpensier and the Count de Beaujolais, together with the Duke de Liancourt and the celebrated Talleyrand. All these exiles brought letters of introduction to Knox, and received a warm welcome within his hospitable doors. Talleyrand, the distinguished French statesman, landed from Europe at Castine. Some curious facts have been adduced to show that this extraordinary character was a native of Mount Desert. It appears that he had not been long in this country, before he visited that island. The older inhabitants there thought they recognized him as the illegitimate child of the pretty daughter of a fisherman, and the captain of a French national ship which touched on the coast of Maine forty years before. The boy, they said, when young, his mother being dead, had been taken away by a French gentleman, who declared that he was descended from a noble family in France. We may know more about this when the autobiography of Talleyrand is given to the world.

*This "small company of five hundred" seems, like the marriage feast of the parable, to have comprised some unworthy as well as many worthy guests. For Mrs. Mary Lincoln, daughter of the famous James Otis, and widow of General Lincoln's oldest son, in a sprightly letter written to her brother-in-law, Judge Theodore Lincoln of Dennysville, Maine, dated Sept. 10, 1795, describing her own long voyage from Passamaquoddy, where she had just made a visit, to Hingham, her home, writes: "The captain begins to think it doubtful whether we shall go to Georges River. If we do I will give you the particulars. I must tell you one thing I have heard along shore, that Mrs. Fluker had her watch stolen the day the mob-ility dined at the General's, and that the General lost two silver cups." This mention of Mrs. Fluker would seem to indicate that at that time Mrs. Knox's mother formed a part of her family. In a part of the same letter, dated later, October 16, 1795, Mrs. Lincoln also writes: "I was disappointed that I could not go to Georges, as I heard on my way that Mrs. Fluker expected me." Perhaps in the vein of raillery, in which the letter was written, Madame Knox herself is the person, evidently the mistress of the house "who expected her," twice mentioned under her mother's name.

At Montpelier, Louis Philippe became acquainted with the beautiful Miss Bingham, afterward the wife of Lord Ashburton, and offered himself to her in marriage. The prospective king was then in reduced pecuniary circumstances, and dependent upon. the generosity of his American friends. Her father declined the royal alliance. "Should you be ever restored to your hereditary position," he said, "you will be too great a match for her; if not, she is too great a match for you." Knox became warmly attached to Liancourt, who passed several months in his family. This unfortunate nobleman once exclaimed in a fit of despondency, as he struck his forehead with his hand, "I have three dukedomes on my head, and not a whole coat to my back.” His wardrobe was replenished by the munificence of his host.

His charity was not, however, confined to such. Many a poorer exile from his native land; many a weary missionary in his round of frontier duty; many a distressed adventurer, found with him a refuge from oppression, rest from fatigue, a hearing, and perhaps adoption of some scheme or discovery. On one occasion he invited the whole Penobscot tribe of Indians to pay him a visit, and entertained them for several days. He loved to see every one happy, and could sympathize with people of every class and condition, rejoice in their prosperity and aid them in adversity.

Beside cultivating the acquaintance of men of learning, Knox maintained a correspondence with many distinguished personages of his time in Europe and America. His library, with a single exception, was the largest in Maine.

Knox offered favorable terms to new settlers, and published advertisements extolling the fertility of his lands, as well as the salubrity of the climate. To the latter, he said that the balsamic firs largely contributed. As an inducement to immigration he commenced several extensive branches of business, which gave employment to a large number of workmen, and afforded a market for the products of the soil and of the forest. In one of his familiar letters to Washington, he writes, "I am beginning to experience the good effects of residing on my lands. I may truly say that the estate is more than doubled in its value since I determined to make it my home." His plans and projects of improvement were more suited to his expansive mind than to his

actual resources, and finally involved him in serious pecuniary embarrassments.* "But had he been permitted to attain the usual age of man, which his vigorous constitution indicated," says Drake, "the clouds that rested upon the latter part of his life would have been dispelled. The increased value of his property would have realized all his anticipations, and enabled him to leave his family in opulence. It was otherwise ordained. A sudden casualty cut him off in the midst of his usefulness, at the age of fifty-six years. The event occurred on Saturday, the twenty-fifth of October, 1806, after an illness of only a few days. It was occasioned by his having accidentally swallowed the minute bone of a chicken, which caused a mortification, and was from its nature incurable." His funeral took place on the following Tuesday. He was entombed under a wide-spreading oak, on the banks of the Georges, in a spot where, when living, he had loved to linger for meditation. Multitudes were present to pay the last tribute of respect to one whom they regarded as a public benefactor, the life of the business community, and the friend of his country and of the human race.

Mrs. Knox survived her husband fourteen years. Of her twelve children, nine of whom died in infancy, only three survived their father, and they, too, have deceased. The family name is extinct. Montpelier is no longer standing. It ought to have become the property of the public, and been preserved as sacred to the memory of its departed owner. Some future generation, if the patriotism of the past shall survive the temptation of the present, will mourn over the insensibility of their fathers, which allowed so sacred a shrine to become obliterated.

* In this embarrassment, Gen. Knox discloses in his correspondence that his most serious regret was that his old compatriot, correspondent and friend, General Lincoln, who had indorsed his notes, was involved and might be reduced from independence to poverty. He was, in fact, sued, all his property attached, and his house and family homestead in Hingham was actually levied upon by the creditors of his friend. He had been advised of the danger and strongly urged, as the debt was not his own, to alienate his property to prevent its being taken in execution, but the old warrior sturdily refused to resort to any such questionable remedies. He wrote, that the notes had been negotiated and money raised upon the credit of his name and of the property in his ownership, and that he could not in honesty dispossess himself of the very security upon which some persons had in good faith advanced their money. For the good fame of General Knox too it ought to be told that he at once put into the hands of his sureties his whole estate, and that in process of time, from the proceeds of the sale of portions of it to settlers, the whole debt was paid, and General Lincoln was enabled to redeem the homestead that had been taken in execution.

In stature, Knox was rather above medium height, his frame well proportioned and inclining to corpulency. In connection with this fullness of person it is stated that when he was selected together with one Captain Sargent to represent to Congress the starving and naked condition of the army at Valley Forge, one of the committee who heard their pleas, remarked that nevertheless he had not for a long time seen an apparently better fed man than the representative who had last spoken, nor one better dressed than the other. Knox remaining mute, probably from indignation, his subordinate replied that "the army, out of respect to Congress and themselves, had sent the only man among them with an ounce of superfluous flesh on his body, and the only other who possessed a complete suit of clothes." When the American troops occupied Boston after its evacuation, Knox, who had even then become quite stout, marched in at the head of the artillery. As he passed on, that celebrated punning Tory, the Rev. Dr. Byles, who had been intimate with the former bookseller, and thought himself privileged on old scores, exclaimed loud enough to be heard, "I never saw an-ox fatter in my life!" But Knox was not in the mood for such low wit. He justly felt offended by this freedom, especially from Byles, whose Tory sentiments were well known, and he replied in not very courteous

terms.

The personal and mental characteristics of General Knox are thus described by William Sullivan, in his " Familiar Letters":

He was a large, full man; his lower limbs inclined a very little outward, so that in walking his feet were nearly parallel. His hair was short in front, standing up, and powdered and queued. His forehead was low; his face, large and full below; his eyes, rather small, gray and brilliant. The expression of his face altogether was a very fine one.

When moving along the street he had an air of grandeur and self-complacency, but it wounded no man's self-love. He carried a large cane, not to aid his steps, but usually under his arm; and sometimes, when he happened to stop and engage in conversation with his accustomed ardor, his cane was used to flourish with. He was usually dressed in black. In the summer he commonly carried his light silk hat in his hand when walking in the shade.

When thinking he looked like one of his own heavy pieces, which would surely do execution when discharged; when speaking his face had a noble expression and was capable of displaying the most benignant feeling. This was the true character of his heart. His voice was