and he had had no tidings of his wife. Therefore it was with impatience that he waited for the signing of the treaty of peace. It was signed at last. Yet it brought unlooked-for results for himself. While the English and American commissioners were arranging the details at Versailles, the countess d'Houdetot had kept constantly flitting between this place and Paris; and one day, bidding De Crèvecœur hasten to her presence, she informed him that the minister of marine wanted to see him, and that he must be prepared to give full information about the geography, population, industry, and government of the American states. "Are you ready to do this?" she asked. "Angel of goodness," exclaimed De Crèvecœur, “I am ready." Accordingly he presented himself to this high official, and so well did he answer all questions, that he was offered any consulship he might wish for in America. De Crèvecœur chose that of New York, and his commission as consul was signed June 22, 1783. Before leaving France he put his son in his aged father's care; then, having been made a corresponding member of the Academy of Sciences, he sailed for New York on the Courrier de l'Europe—the first of a line of packets established by the French government between France and America. He arrived on the 19th of November, after a passage of fifty-four days, and just as the last British soldiers were evacuating the city. De Crèvecœur's first thought was to find his family. Alas! his wife was dead, and the two children whom he had left with her had been carried off by a stranger, he knew not whither. Happily William Seton, who had lost his fortune by the war, again came to his aid. He took him home, helped him search for his children, and after seventeen days of anguish De Crèvecœur learned they were in Boston, tenderly cared for by Mr. George Fellows, father of Lieutenant Fellows of the American navy.

De Crèvecœur sent his boy Louis to join Ally in France, but kept with him his daughter Fanny, then thirteen years old. Although naturally modest, De Crèvecœur took a pardonable pride in being the first consul of France in New York. He found the country still much excited. The commercial marine of the United States was in a precarious condition. How would it thrive under the new flag? The people, however, were full of hope, for they had independence. Home industries were beginning to revive, and De Crèvecœur tells us that the American mechanics were the most ingenious in the world.

Before long the friendship between France and America cooled somewhat. The truth is, the mere fact of separation had not broken the many natural ties which linked the American to the English people. English merchants offered the largest credits, although the duties imposed

on American goods were heavy. So evident was the good feeling between the mother country and the United States, that a French writer declared in 1788 that England now enjoyed all the advantages without having to fulfill the duties of a mother country. Seemingly no right had been lost except the right of naming the governors. But while the other French consuls wrote home complaints and dispatches full of jealousy toward England, not so De Crèvecœur, and here he revealed his strong commonsense. He sent to France only practical letters describing American machinery. He likewise sent home models of our machines. Nor did he fear to praise our institutions, for De Crèvecœur was no blind reactionist. Among the things considered by him most useful to France was American. wood, especially live oak, against which French ship-builders were foolishly prejudiced. He strove to open their eyes, and succeeded in getting permission of his government to have a vessel built here of live oak. A shipwright of Boston, named Peck, the best in the country, was chosen to build this vessel, which was launched in 1786, and named the Maréchal de Costries. Even her sails were of American manufacture, and as De Crèvecœur had foreseen, she was much admired by French seamen. He also tried to infuse a more honest spirit among French merchants, some of whom during the Revolution had taken advantage of our straits and flooded our markets with wine not fit to be drunk. He took an active part, too, in drawing up a postal treaty between France and the United States. In fact, it was De Crèvecœur who first proposed such a treaty.

Religion also engaged his attention, although he had been somewhat lax in his religious duties; and having been requested by the Catholics of the city to assist them in erecting a church, he set to work with enthusiasm to raise a subscription, and even interested the archbishop of Paris in this good work, which was crowned by the dedication of St. Peter's church in Barclay street.

De Crèvecœur had been consul little more than a year when New Haven, in appreciation of his good-will and his services (he had earnestly called the attention of his government to the rising industries of New England), presented him with the freedom of the city. But, as we have said, he was a modest man, and at once furnished the municipality of New Haven with a list of names of Frenchmen who, he declared, merited this high honor quite as much as himself. Accordingly all his old friends at home were offered the freedom of the city of New Haven; and this raised such an outcry--for it was impossible to include all Frenchmen in the list that the whole of France became alive to the existence and importance of New Haven! Before long Hartford, not wishing to be outdone, also decreed

him one of her citizens, and then as never before the eyes of all Frenchmen were drawn to the existence of Hartford! To use a not very elegant expression, it proved a good thing all around; so good that a little later Vermont, on the proposition of Ethan Allen, conferred on De Crèvecœur, as well as on his three children, the title of citizens of Vermont, and even named a town after him-St. Johnsbury-which soon became very flourishing.

In 1785 De Crèvecœur made a visit to France. His leave of absence was for six months, but it was lengthened to nearly two years. He was warmly received by his government, and his first efforts were to establish a better line of packets between the two countries; at the same time he insisted that Havre, and not L'Orient, should be the port of sailing from France. Needless to say, his old friend the countess d'Houdetot opened her house to him. There De Crèvecœur met Lafayette, whom he induced to help him introduce American wood into the French naval arsenals. He was almost immediately made a member of "The Royal Society of Agriculture of Paris," and he quickly called the attention of the society to an improved American churn and to our sweet potatoes. He also wrote to all his friends about our locust trees, urging their usefulness; and he planted some locust slips in the park of the duke de la Rochefoucauld. Nay, De Crèvecœur even suggested a world's exhibition of all useful trees, plants, and machines from other countries, giving a conspicuous place in the ex-hibition to whatever came from the United States. At length his vacation ended and he returned to New York, having first placed his sons at an excellent school in Paris, where they had as companion a young American, George Washington Greene, a son of General Greene; and the good countess d'Houdetot promised that his boys should find in her a mother, and she kept her promise.

In 1788 De Crèvecœur wrote to the duke d'Harcourt, governor to the dauphin of France, an interesting communication on the use of steam on boats. He had watched with attention the controversy between James Rumsey and John Fitch as to priority of invention of the steamboat, and De Crèvecœur urged the duke d'Harcourt to have Fitch given a small sum of money with which to make a little model of his steamer. He intended to bring this model to France on one of the packets. At about the same time De Crèvecœur also wrote to Franklin, and Franklin's answer, dated February 17, 1788, is interesting: " Although I have never doubted that steam properly applied would be able to make a boat go against the current of most of our rivers, nevertheless when I considered the first cost of such a machine as a steam vessel, the necessity of always

having a skilled mechanician to manage the boat and to repair it, a man who would demand high wages, and when I considered also the space which the machinery would occupy, I was inclined to fear, I own, that the advantages of the invention were not great enough to bring it into general use; but the opinion of Mr. Rittenhouse which you send me, who is an excellent judge, has given me a more favorable impression.

BENJ. FRANKLIN."

Unhappily the revolution in France was approaching, and this prevented De Crèvecœur's ardent efforts in behalf of Fitch from bearing fruit. Had the political sky of France been brighter it is not improbable that the first steamboat might have paddled up the Seine instead of up the Hudson. On 13th April, 1790, De Crèvecœur's daughter was married in St. Peter's church, New York, to Louis William Otto, secretary of the French Legation. She was his second wife, his first having been Miss Livingston, daughter of Peter Van Brugh Livingston and Mary Alexander. At the wedding in old St. Peter's were present Thomas Jefferson, Richard Morris, and many other distinguished persons.

A few weeks later De Crèvecœur sailed for France on the packet-ship Washington. He was destined never to see America again. The terrible upheaval in his native land brought about sad changes. Many of his friends were beheaded. He became very poor, but he lived on and on to a good old age, and died November 12, 1813, surrounded by his children and grandchildren. Let us not forget him. When ours was a young and weak and struggling nation, it had no better friend than St. John De Crèvecœur.

William Setou

CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS.

NEW YORK'S GREAT LAND-OWNER, GEORGE CLARKE

George Clarke, whose death at Richfield Springs has recently attracted wide attention, was the lineal descendant of a prominent character for forty years in New York colonial history. It was in 1703 that George Clarke was appointed secretary of the province, and subsequently served for a long series of years as one of the royal counselors, and then as lieutenant-governor and acting governor of New York. His wife was Anne Hyde, a cousin of Queen Anne, and at the time they came to New York Lord Cornbury (Edward Hyde) was the governor. Mrs. Clarke was one of the most accomplished and charming of women. She was regarded with such enthusiastic affection by the people, that when she died, in 1740, the whole city was thrown into the deepest affliction. Her generosity to the poor had given her the title of "Lady Bountiful," and on the day of her funeral the corporation ordered "that, as it was a pleasure to her in life to feed the hungry, a loaf of bread should be given to every poor person who would receive it." Her great-great-grandson, George Clarke, the subject of this sketch, was born at Hyde Hall, at the head of Otsego lake, in Springfield township, New York, in June, 1822. Lieutenant-Governor George Clarke had, by grant of the crown, come into possession of some sixty thousand acres of land in the counties of Otsego, Montgomery, Oneida, and Dutchess, and the larger share of this property descended to George Clarke of Hyde Hall. The following biographical sketch appeared in the Utica Press of a recent date:

George Clarke was a handsome, intellectual-looking man, with a decided stamp of the old Puritan self-denying hardness plainly marked on his face. It is said he would allow none of his family, except his son, near him in his last sickness. His face showed that characteristic of sternness we call a good hater.' If the circumstances had come to him, Clarke was a man who could have left the tracks of bloody feet upon the frozen Delaware without a murmur, or have watched a Jesuit burn without a pang. As it was, he sacrificed talents, ambition, property, and perhaps even life in an obstinate and determined struggle for oné end—to own land. He worked for that with the tireless and unswerving energy of a Napoleon. If he could have written his own biography, Clarke would have simply said: The great land-owner of the state of New York is dead.'

It was the ruling passion of his life to be known as 'the great land