Early Settlement of Old Saratoga
The Woodland Indians roamed the banks of the Hudson River in the vicinity of Schuylerville as early as 500 A.D. Their characteristic intricate crosshatch ornamentation has been found on pottery shards near buried fire pits almost always within a dozen rods of the river’s edge. Indeed, a notable find is located at the very site of the first European outpost here, the so-called Fort Vroman, a house ordered fortified by the authorities at Albany in 1689. The Mohawks whose artifacts indicate that they arrived about 800 A.D followed the earlier Woodland people. Then for centuries our valley was the hotly disputed border between the Iroquois, of whom the Mohawks were but one tribe, and the Mohicans, an Algonquin people. To the aborigines the area was known as Sa-ragh-to-ga, meaning “hillside country of the great river” or perhaps “place where the waters meet” inasmuch as the Fish Kill flowing from the west and the Batten Kill coming from the east join the Hudson at this place and thus formed a vital waterborne transportation hub.
It was to this area that the first Europeans were attracted for the same reason. Major Peter Schuyler, then mayor of Albany, cleared a spot in the forest and built a blockhouse in 1690, giving to it the name Fort Saratoga. Soon, in the opening years of the eighteenth century, small mills harnessed the abundant waterpower offered by the kills, and homesteads appeared. On November 17, 1745 this hamlet of some thirty families was suddenly attacked and destroyed, most of its inhabitants massacred, by the French and their Indian allies who by stealth had swept down from Canada. Peter Schuyler himself was killed in his own house. Recurring strife continuing until the peace settlement between England and France in 1763 effectively depopulated the upper Hudson valley until shortly before the outbreak of the American Revolution. In 1767 Phillip Schuyler erected on the bank of the Fish Kill the first flax mill in America. In 1770 the Dutch Reformed Church built its first meeting place, later used as a hospital during the Burgoyne Campaign. The subject of this article, the Marshall House, was built in 1763 and is the sole surviving pre-revolution building in this storied vicinity.
The DeRidders, Abraham Marshall, Thomas Jordan, Conrad Cramer, John Woeman, William Green, Thomas Smith, the Welches and Strovers, the Dunhams, James Brisbin, George Davis and Sherman Pattison were settlers who arrived during the interval between the French and Indian War and the American Revolution. Some of their names yet attach to local places and four corners, descendants, and to headstones in family and public cemeteries.
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The Marshall House
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The Marshall House 1872
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First Floor Plan
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Present Floor Plan
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Original Mantelpiece
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Original Front Door Lock & Hinges - Interior
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At this point imagine what the Saratoga of those days looked like. On both sides of the Fish Kill (also called Fish Creek) were saw mills, plaster mills, the flax mill earlier mentioned, grist mills and small boat yards. South of the creek stood the Dutch church and perhaps two dozen houses clustered between it and the Schuyler house, itself situated on a slight rise above the creek, with its prosperous farm lying in the angle formed by the creek’s confluence with the Hudson and stretching off southwards. The Schuylers, unlike their Dutch Hudson valley counterparts who ran great feudal estates, were themselves farmers, merchants and developers. After acquiring their vast properties, sometimes with partners, they created what we would style infrastructure. They enticed settlers by offering to sell to them on easy terms land for their farms and homes, the materials to construct them and promises to purchase their usufruct. Old deeds reveal their terms of bargain and sale in exchange for so many chickens, bushels of grain, head of sheep and a few days work on the roads the Schuylers built to serve them. Thus the mind’s eye sees a busy village nestled against the gentle hills west of the Hudson with outlying farms to the south, west and north. While most of the buildings were of wood the Schuyler House itself was of brick, substantial and permanent. Water power furnished by Fish Creek, fertile farm land all about and ease of transport to Albany and beyond afforded by the Hudson River gave rise to the growth of this community.
Amongst the prominent families of Albany were the Lansings, descendants of the first Dutch settlers, who were, so to speak, butchers, bakers and candle-makers but chiefly merchants. One of them, Peter Lansing (not the Peter who later became Chancellor of New York State) caused what is now known as the Marshall House to be built between 1770-73 on “lot number one of the tenth allotment of the Kayderosseras patent, bounded on the south by the north line of the Saratoga patent, containing about forty acres.” Lansing’s purpose was to here install someone who would gather farm produce and timber from other settlers and forward the same to Albany for him to market.
To what extent Lansing’s effort succeeded is unknown. The original structure, forty by twenty-eight feet, was one and a half storeys, heavily timbered and framed, partially ballast brick nogged and with a gambrel roof, the whole built upon a fieldstone foundation containing a full cellar. In each gable end was a fireplace and chimney flanked by windows on both floors. In common with other domestic buildings of its time its interior space was divided by a central hall with one or two rooms adjoining. To the southeast corner was attached what may have been a single storey kitchen wing with its own fireplace and chimney. Each of the “front” rooms had two windows facing east but the rear fenestration of the house at that time is not known. The structure is essentially post and beam. Remarkable are the hand-hewn ten inch by ten inch joists notched into equally large sills upon which are twelve to sixteen inch wide hard pine floorboards secured by hand-cut square iron nails. A handsome dentelle mantle-piece was (and is) a graceful feature in the south room. Though the house faces generally east recent work revealed a once-upon-a-time west-facing door in the central hall. Old maps show that the British military road from Albany to Skenesboro (now Whitehall) may have originally lay behind the building which, of course, may have been its original front. The house stands on a knoll about two hundred yards west of and some thirty feet above the Hudson River, a scant two miles north of the original village of Saratoga.
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The Battle for Freedom
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Positions Prior to Surrender at Saratoga, October 17, 1777
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The Marshall House on British Military Map - Close Up
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To break the back of the American Revolution the British devised a plan to divide the New England states from the other united colonies. Three forces would converge on Albany, one from New York, one from the west and one from Montreal. The British in New York failed to receive timely orders, the force marching from the west was defeated at Fort Stanwix (now Rome), and the army commanded by Lieutenant General John Burgoyne coming south was forced to surrender to the Americans led by General Horatio Gates at Saratoga (now Schuylerville) following two punishing engagements in what are known as the Battles of Saratoga. Burgoyne’s army of some nine thousand men included nearly three thousand hired German troops commanded by Baron Friedrich Adolf Riedesel.
Riedesel was accompanied on this expedition by his wife, Baroness Frederika Charlotte Louise, née von Massow, and their three young daughters, Augusta, Frederika and Caroline. Mrs. General Riedesel was thirty-two years old at the time. She was a woman devoted to her husband, a lady of remarkable courage and resourcefulness. In her letters and diary her observations of the personalities of the officers and men on both sides are astute. Her writing style is at once lucid, simple, rhythmical and powerful. She is entitled to be called the first female war correspondent. Her letters and diary which include a number of letters addressed to her by her husband, were published in 1800 appearing in both German and English editions. The excerpts contained in this narrative are taken from William L. Stone’s translation into English published by Joel Munsell, Albany in 1867.
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1777 - The American Revolution - The Marshall House Becomes A Landmark
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Bloodstains on Library Floor
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Three of Eleven Canon Balls
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Following his defeat at the Second Battle of Saratoga General Burgoyne reluctantly and hesitatingly determined to escape with what remained of his army to Montreal in the hope that the campaign might be resumed in the next year. However, heavy incessant rains bogged down his artillery and baggage train on the march north, so much so that by the time he reached the hamlet of Saratoga, where he erected defensive fortifications, he discovered his force surrounded by the Americans. On October 10, 1777 he requisitioned the Lansing farmhouse (now the Marshall House) for use as a hospital for wounded officers and men and as a refuge for the wives and children who accompanied their officer husbands. One of the women thus sheltered was the Baroness Frederika Charlotte Louise Riedesel and her three young daughters, Augusta, Frederika and Caroline. Madame Riedesel’s husband was Baron Friedrich Adolf Riedesel who commanded the German mercenary troops attached to the British army. It is to this remarkable lady that we owe not only so much of our knowledge of the house but also of the personalities of Burgoyne, his officers and of the deplorable state of his ill-fated retreat.
In her celebrated diary and letters, elegantly yet simply written, the baroness recounts her experiences, her fears, her joys and her relief. Always fearful that the worst might befall her husband, she recounts her relief when venturing out at night she sees off to the south her husband’s campfires softly illuminating the gloom. In daytime she spots the
sharpshooters watching the house from the opposite shore of the Hudson who made marks of the men who ventured forth from the house to fetch water. Nowadays to visualize these scenes is difficult because trees and bushes thickly cover what was then a cleared landscape. From an eminence slightly north of the Batten Kill which flows into the Hudson opposite cannons manned by Americans of Captain Furnival’s artillery battery constantly menaced the house with occasional fire in the mistaken belief that the building was Burgoyne’s headquarters.
What is being described is an ample yet simple farmhouse with fields behind it. The farm itself was but forty acres, some of it swampy, its soils of clay punctured by shale outcrops. The farm perhaps supported two or three family cows, a few head of sheep, some poultry, a dozen hogs and a horse or two. Because the Lansing family had fled before the British onslaught it is likely that the livestock was gone and the crops left to ruin. The baroness informs us that even the well had gone dry.
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Baroness Reidesel as Young Woman
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Historical Marker on the Lawn
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Elsewhere in this article the reader has been given a brief description of the house as it was at the time of the Battles of Saratoga. It is well to note here somewhat of its present character. The arrangement of the ground floor rooms has little changed save that a partition in the north room was removed some seventy years ago and that one of the two rooms on the south side of the hall was enlarged in 1868 when the gambrel roof was replaced by a single slope roof to enlarge the upstairs rooms and to add windows. The old kitchen wing was torn off at the same time and a two storey kitchen wing added to the southwest rear of the building. Its second floor space was divided appropriately for occupancy by a farmhand or perhaps a household servant. Throughout, the basic structure has been little altered otherwise though the front window bays were made floor-to-ceiling at the time of the 1868 alteration.
Of particular interest are the wide white pine board floors on both floors of the original portion of the Marshall House. In the north room, now servings as a library, the floor has never been painted. The boards are roughly tongue-and-grooved and the spaces between them retain some of the limed clay filler used to smooth them. In the other rooms, upstairs and down, the paint has been removed to reveal the original character of the flooring. Where the addition of 1868 joins the original structure the wide boards suddenly give way to narrower ones, a sharp demarcation. Remaining and still in use from the time of the Battles of Saratoga are the hinges and great lock on the front door and the delicate thumb latch and the wooden door itself in the cellarway. A rectangular opening in the present dining room ceiling, discernible though closed, would, opened, reveal a beam shattered by an American cannon ball. The mantelpiece in the south room (now the music room) is original. In the north room, where the floor is blood stained, are displayed two three pound and one five pound solid shot cannon balls, three of the eleven the baroness reports as having struck the building.
The cellar where the baroness with her children, officers’ wives and wounded crowded together seeking refuge during the cannonading retains it solid fieldstone walls and heavy joists let into the surrounding sill. Until sixty-five years ago the floor was earth but is now paved with large flagstones acquired when the old sidewalks in Schuylerville were lifted in favor of concrete. The space, once divided by plain vertical board walls into three rooms, is nowadays entirely open. Though a steam boiler and pipes serving radiators above together with an extensive model railroad may jar a history purist the vastness of the cellar, its impressive hand-hewn beams and the old door through which frightened men and women rushed to safety ignite one’s imagination. Through this door, too, were carried the
dead for burial with quicklime in shallow graves hastily dug fifty yards away to the south.
For ten days preceding Burgoyne’s surrender acts brave and cowardly, kind and mean, generous and pitiful, heroic and tragic took place within the walls of this venerable house, itself the sole survivor and witness to the decisive event at Saratoga in 1777 which was the turning point of the American Revolution.
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1817 - The Marshall Family
Following the Revolution the Saratoga area experienced a slow revival. The Schuylers resumed their businesses, saw mills and manufactories. The Schuyler enthusiasm for developing a system of canals in New York animated optimism. Families that had fled from the British advance one by one returned to their farms. The forebears of the author of this essay arrived in 1810 and over the following years set themselves up as merchants, tavern keepers, factory owners, bankers, doctors and farmers. In 1793 President George Washington accompanied by Governor George Clinton visited the scenes of battle and stopped with the Schuylers whose house had been rebuilt shortly after Burgoyne’s surrender. An English traveler, one Sir William Strickland, was a guest of the Schuylers in 1794. In his diary he describes his journey on horseback from Saratoga Springs to “Schuyler’s Mills,” as he called Saratoga, as a ride through a tunnel of ancient pines. Settlers old and new picked up where they had left off before the war and as they were doing so other travelers made Saratoga a destination, drawn by the drama of the epoch Battles of Saratoga and General Burgoyne’s stunning defeat.
In about 1785 Peter Lansing sold his house and farm to Samuel Bushee who arrived from from Connecticut soon after the Revolution. Bushee married Mary, the daughter of Abraham Marshall (who arrived from England in 1763) and sold it to Samuel Marshall in 1817 with the proviso that he retain the right to reside in the property until his death which occured in 1835. Mr. Bushee was in the American army during the Revolution, and was at Monmouth in the New Jersey campaign. Upon the publication of the diary and letters of Baroness Riedesel (in German and English) in 1800 the soon-to-be Marshall House, the former Peter Lansing place, became an historical landmark. The Marshall family through three generations dwelt in the property until 1930. The Marshalls, Samuel, his son William B. and four grandchildren, the last of whom were Jennie and Fannie, were farmer folk. High prices for wool needed for Union Army uniforms enriched William who undertook the aforementioned renovation of 1868 when the house achieved its present appearance in the Italianate style. Sensitive to the history of the place he largely retained the original interior division of space and the artifacts remaining from the time of the baroness’ sojourn.
An old photograph taken in the spring about 1844 illustrates the appearance of the house at that time, revealing that some modest changes had been made since the Revolution. Immediately noticed are numerous black locust trees surrounding it, two white pines then already well grown near the northeast corner and several outbuildings. What appears to be a kitchen wing attached to the south-east end of the house seems to have been added some years previously. The inside chimneys dating from the time of first construction were still in place. The windows left of the front door are twelve over twelve double hung while those of the left are six over six. This detail reveals the beginning of transformation. The smaller panes were undoubtedly glazed with bull’s eye glass, the larger ones with cylinder glass thus reflecting the then occurring improvements in glass making technology. Evidence of active agriculture is obvious. It is likely that the Marshalls of the time were subsistence farmers with little more to market than a few bushels of grain,
perhaps a dozen hogs, eggs and a few chickens. In common with their neighbors they cultivated a few apple trees for making their own hard cider The couple in the picture were probably Mr. and Mrs. Samuel Marshall, the third women a relative or a household helper. Of particular interest are the trees, several of which remain to this day.
In the years following the Civil War the fortunes of the Marshalls gradually declined. William’s sons left for Colorado to join the silver rush in the 1890s while the daughters remained, first conducting a summer hostelry but later a boarding house for mill hands at the Standard Manufacturing wallpaper factory a half mile to the north. The Hudson Valley Railway electric interurban used to pause at the Marshall House stop at the foot of the hill.
A forebear of the author, General Edward Fitch Bullard, in his centennial address delivered in 1877, noted that the house formerly belonged to the Lansing family of Albany but that it had been deserted before the British army arrived from the north in September of 1777. In his remarks he said, “It was a two storey house, having a gable or French roof, fronting east with a hall in the middle and a room at each end. One of the old rafters and the plank of the partition, each shattered by a cannon ball, are still carefully preserved on the spot by Mrs. Marshall.” He went on, “The room in which the wounded man (Surgeon Jones) lay... is (in) the northeast angle of the house, and the visitor can see on casting an eye across the river, that the cannon ball that did the mischief must have stood on a small eminence still visible on the eastern bank.”
Nowadays no Marshalls remain in these parts. Because that family so long lived here the place is yet widely known as the Marshall House. The last Marshall relative known to the writer was a Mrs. Schneider who used to come and go as she pleased. Of her more anon.
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1868 - The Italian Renaissance
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Italiante Arches - detail
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The alterations made by William Marshall in 1868 were more cosmetic than structural. The old fireplaces were taken down, victims of the cast-iron stove revolution. The gambrel roof was removed and replaced by a higher single pitch soldered tin one to enable fenestration and larger rooms on the second floor. The south kitchen wing seen in the 1844 photo was torn away and succeeded by a larger two-storey addition onto the southwest corner of the building. A somewhat less substantial addition, said to have been a carriage house with small rooms above it, was semi-attached behind the new addition. A horse barn and a cow barn were built nearby south of the house at about this time. The principal ornamentation of the house, a wrap-around-narrow front porch with bundled, chamfered posts linked by delicate arches is conspicuous. Above, a moulded fascia beneath an imposing cornice delicately emphasizes the Italianate style. The east facing windows became floor to ceiling triple hung. Shutters were installed. Withal, the original exterior configuration of the house disappeared though the interior above the original footprint was little altered. Preserved, and now and then exposed, is a rectangular opening in the dining room ceiling wherein a beam, shattered by a cannon ball, can be viewed. But where was the well? A trace of one is discernible in the present driveway but there were probably others nearer the livestock enclosures.
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1930 - The Bullard Family
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Marshall House 2004
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17 lb Canon Ball Found 2002
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Old Well Found 2004
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The writer’s parents, Thomas Kenneth and Adelaide Bullard, purchased the Marshall House in 1930 from the elderly Jennie Marshall Sample and Fannie Marshall. Because Mr. Bullard’s father, Dr. Thomas E. Bullard, had long cared for the Marshall ladies,
he was familiar with the place, had developed a fondness for it and a desire to save it. The foundation beneath the northeast corner was partially collapsed and that corner of the house eight inches below level. To accommodate boarders rooms upstairs and down had been cut up into small spaces. There were a half dozen shelf chimneys to serve the pot-bellied stoves used for heating. Outbuildings were sagging. The old place had fallen on hard times.
Mr. and Mrs. Bullard effected repairs to the foundation and sills, removed partitions and restored the original division of space. The fireplaces were re-erected on the exterior rather than in the interior. They discovered the original mantle and restored it to the south room. Leveling the floors caused much plaster to crack and fall so the walls were freshly plastered. The ornate double front doors with their fluoride glass lights were replaced with a reproduction of the original Dutch door using the hinges, lock, key and escutcheon found in the building from the time of the Lansings. Decaying outbuildings were razed. A central steam heating system replaced the cast-iron stoves with their maze of tin pipes and crumbling chimneys. Three cannon balls that had struck the building when the baroness sheltered here together with other artifacts were passed from the Marshalls to the Bullards and remain displayed today. From 1930 until 1993, sixty-three years, the Marshall House was both a family home and the center of the Bullards’ extensive fruit, vegetable and dairy farm operations. Incidental to these activities the remains of soldiers who perished in the house during its siege were accidentally exhumed. Numerous musket balls, coins, shards and old hardware have been found and collected. Mr. and Mrs. Bullard, working over a span of thirty years, succeeded in returning the Marshall House to its 1868 splendor while simultaneously enhancing those essential features remaining from its great historic moments in the autumn of 1777.
The writer, son of Mr. and Mrs. Bullard, continues to reside in the property. He recalls it fondly from his family’s farming days. There were late night telephone calls from migrant laborers needful of cash to complete their journeys north from Florida. There were grand family reunions. Mr. Bullard was fond of picnics and upon returning from the fields he declared to us all of a sudden sometimes that we had right then to have an “emergency picnic.” On another occasion after a devastating hail storm had ruined his apple crop Mr. Bullard came home and said to his wife, “Addie, let’s put on some records and dance.” And so they did. This old home for two hundred and thirty-odd years has been love’s dwelling place, too.
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1957 - The Apple Cottage
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Apple Cottage Lower Entrance
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In 1957 the writer, who had lived a dozen years in the Far East, built a small two storey cottage beside the small brook, now dammed to create a pond in the woods, at the rear of the property. This structure and its furnishings, some brought from the writer’s homes in Kyoto and Tokyo, is inspired by Japanese domestic architecture. Like its parent, the Marshall House, it is constructed of local materials. Within and without the walls are of pine, the ground floor is slate flagstone from a nearby quarry and the roof, too, is slate. Interior features include a cryptomeria stair railing and cherry false rafters from Japan supporting a sawali split bamboo mat ceiling from the Philippine Islands. The bedroom ceiling is covered with grass paper brought from Korea. On a sign beside its doorway “Apple Cottage” is written in both Japanese and English. This winsome little house is used as an occasional residence, as a guest house and as a studio for the writer’s wife who is a well-known composer. This secluded cottage with its pleasant associations is a lovely daughter of the Marshall House.
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2002 - The North Sea
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The North Sea
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The wife of the writer is a Welsh woman. Too assuage her occasional longings for Britain in 2002 the writer created for her in the northwest angle of the house a replica in washed stone of the rugged coastline of the North Sea. The stone is from a nearby gravel bed, itself one of several in the geologic Batten Kill delta. It is washed and softly colorful, reminiscent of the shingle common on Britain’s northeast coast. In this “sea” are four moss covered “islands,” red sandstone rocks dug from the writer’s sometime orchard. The Make-believe coastline is bordered in part by low juniper branches. The British have returned!
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2005 - The Marshall House Now
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The Marshall House in 1844
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Present Owners - David Bullard and Hilary Tann
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Though a private home and not in any way a museum persons interested in the Battles of Saratoga and the adventures of the Baroness Riedesel are occasional vistors. Notable amongst them are members of the Riedesel family from Germany and the United States where several now reside. Shown are three of the eleven cannon balls the baroness records as having penetrated the building and another one recently found in the field behind the property, one of a clutch of four. The cellarway door with its hand-made thumb latch and strap hinges, opened and closed by the baroness herself, is another arresting feature. Of course, the bloodstains on the north room floor are stubborn evidence of the horror described by Mrs. General Riedesel. The mantlepiece, front-door hardware, musket balls, arrowheads and structural details such as floors, beams, joists and woodwork fascinate historians and the merely curious alike.
All old houses require of their owners a particular dedication. The present owners are alive to the historical and architectural importance of the Marshall House and devote themselves to maintaining and enhancing its integrity. Thermalpane windows recently installed were custom-made to conform in pattern and shape to the old ones. What was a 1940s style kitchen was restored to its mid-nineteenth century character. The tall graceful black locusts that were already fair sized when photographed in 1844 tie the past to the present. An arbor, flower and vegetable gardens, a lichen covered stone wall evoke olden times. Unlike so many restored historic buildings open from 9:00 to 5:00 so to speak, empty of life and activity and frozen in time, the Marshall House is filled with life, savory smells from its kitchen, music, business and creative work. As it was lo! two hundred and nearly thirty years ago it remains ever a refuge, a graceful shelter, a treasured home. It has its own vitality, its stories and its own grace. Its space encloses a thrilling chapter of history.
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Legends
WELL, are there ghosts? After all, with deaths, screaming artillery attacks, burials by moonlight and the comings and goings of its many inhabitants are there no inexplicable tales?
Some years back the writer rented the house to a couple from New York City that intended to enjoy the racing season at Saratoga Springs, a dozen miles hence. Three or four days following their arrival the husband suddenly declared that they had to leave, reluctantly, because his wife had been vexed each night by a phantom. More recently a young man now a Hollywood script writer, who passed several days here said that he had been awakened by a ghost floating to and from in his bedroom. But of remarkable accounts of other supernatural events none exceed that experienced by the writer’s father. One noontime he returned from the farm for our mid-day meal in a most solemn mood though he was a man of constant humor and a practical one as well. After prodding to find out why he was so quiet, so withdrawn, he told us that that morning while walking in the orchard some hundred rods from the house he spied an old fellow seated on the grass beneath an old Northern Spy apple tree. As he approached, the man got up and greeted father saying, “Hello Ken. I am glad to see you.” Then they fell into conversation about the farm and family as they walked about together looking at the growing crop. Finally the old man examined his gold pocket watch and declared, “I must be going. I shall see you by and by.” With that he walked down the row and vanished. That man was the writer’s grandfather who had been dead for going on twenty years. Mr. Bullard to his own dying day never swerved from the truth of what he disclosed to us.
At least one spirit was actually alive. For many years a Volkswagen beetle driven by a man wearing a coat and tie and sporting a Panama hat used to drive up the hill and park. He always remained in his car but his wife climbed out and made for the back door. She was a frumpy little woman who always wore a shapeless faded print dress that fell below her knees. She wore rolled up stockings and sneakers. Her name was Mrs. Schneider. She simply walked in, smiled at whoever was about and made for the south room where she sat down and glanced about her. After ten minutes or so she arose, went upstairs and into the southeast bedroom where she seated herself on the edge of the bed or in a chair for a little while. Without uttering more than a word or two of greeting she walked back down and through to the kitchen, outdoors and climbed into her husband’s little car which then down the hill and away. She appeared at queer times, during mealtime, once when there was a party underway but always, it seems, when the fancy took her. It turned out that Mrs. Schneider was a Marshall niece who many years ago came in summertime to pass a week or two with her aunts. She came to relive those happy days. When the writer’s children were naughty they promptly recovered their manners when threatened with a visit from Mrs. Schneider.
There are many more stories but they must await a winter’s evening and a good fire.
T. David Bullard
November 27, 2004
