I had begun to move about a little and enjoy the splendor of that
forest home. There were, indeed, many rare and priceless things in
it that came out of her chateau in France. She had some curious
old clocks, tokens of ancestral taste and friendship. There was
one her grandfather had got from the land of Louis XIV.--_Le Grand
Monarque_, of whom my mother had begun to tell me as soon as I
could hear with understanding. Another came from the bedchamber of
Philip II of Spain--a grand high clock that had tolled the hours in
that great hall beyond my door. A little thing, in a case of
carved ivory, that ticked on a table near my bed, Moliere had given
to one of her ancestors, and there were many others of equal
interest.

Her walls were adorned with art treasures of the value of which I
had little appreciation those days. But I remember there were
canvases of Correggio and Rembrandt and Sir Joshua Reynolds. She
was, indeed, a woman of fine taste, who had brought her best to
America; for no one had a doubt, in the time of which I am writing,
that the settlement of the Compagnie de New York would grow into a
great colony, with towns and cities and fine roadways, and the full
complement of high living. She had built the Hermitage,--that was
the name of the mansion,--fine and splendid as it was, for a mere
temporary shelter pending the arrival of those better days.

She had a curious fad, this hermit baroness of the big woods. She
loved nature and was a naturalist of no poor attainments. Wasps
and hornets were the special study of this remarkable woman. There
were at least a score of their nests on her front portico--big and
little, and some of them oddly shaped. She hunted them in wood and