GENERAL MARTIN MILLER. 



SKATING, ICE-BOATING AND CAMP COOKERY. 



WITH clothing torn and bloody, his face bruised 

 and cut, one eye blackened and swollen shut, 

 Mat Miller came down the main street in 

 Greenbush one day. Beside him walked a giant negro, 

 like Eugene Aram, "with gyves upon his wrists," and in 

 a condition like Mat's as to face and clothing. This sight 

 so impressed me that it always came up whenever I heard 

 of or saw Mr. Miller. We little boys had never seen such 

 a sight, and when we learned that the colored desperado 

 had been a terror to the country for miles around, and was 

 a burglar, and that Constable Miller, having learned that 

 he was sleeping in the old spook-house barn, had attacked 

 him alone and captured him after a long and fierce fight, 

 he was our hero. We learned in later years that this 

 genial, fine-looking athlete was the champion wrestler of 

 Rensselaer County, and at "collar and elbow" or "square 

 hold" could lay the local wrestlers on their backs. But 

 this capture of the powerful burglar overtopped his other 

 feats. 



Some time after this event Herr Driesbach, the great 

 animal trainer, wintered his menagerie in Greenbush, in 

 the stables of Bill Gaines, the local racing man, on Broad- 

 way, just below Columbia Street, back of Fly's brick 

 store, which still stands there. In those days the circus 

 and the menagerie were two distinct things. The circus 

 had no animals, while the menagerie had a ring in which 

 dogs and monkeys rode on ponies and appealed to that 

 portion of the public which objected to men and women 



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