INTRODUCTORY CHAPTERS XXXV 



ester to his friend "Tom Draw" and which upon the death 

 of Tom Demerest went to Tom Draw's grandson, Mr. 

 Thomas Harry Ward, of Sterling-ton, near Ramapo. Then 

 and there both of us mentally resolved to see that gun, if 

 seeing were possible, before we returned. 



We arrived about five o'clock, four hours from New 

 York City to cover the sixty odd miles which Archer's 

 gallant nags had covered in approximately eleven hours, 

 including stops. 



Forester Avenue was rightfully named, for it wound up 

 by the Shingle House straight to the door of Tom Draw's 

 Tavern, which in by-gone days was 



"a long white house with piazza six feet wide at 

 the top of eight steep steps, and a one-story 

 kitchen at the end of it ; a pump with a gilt pine- 

 apple at the top of it, and horse-trough; a wagon 

 shed and stable sixty feet long; a sign-post with 

 an indescribable female figure swinging upon it, 

 and an ice house over the way." 



The tavern was still the same, but when the road was 

 graded in front the cellar was left as the first story, leav- 

 ing the piazza like the high galleries around the mansions 

 of the southern plantations. 



The next day upon closer inspection, we found little of 

 old time interest about the tavei'n save possibly the ancient 

 split clapboards covering it; gone was everything of For- 

 ester's times except off the cellar a cone-topped circular 

 Dutch oven, which in olden days was used to bake in and 

 now had been transformed into a jam closet. 



Upstairs we did find on one of the cross hallway en- 

 trances into the main hallway, marks where the doorway 

 had been cut away, for when Tom Draw, who stood but 

 five feet three or four inches high and weighed over two 

 hundred and fifty pounds, had been encased in his last 

 overcoat — a wooden one — the casket was so broad that the 

 doorway was far too narrow for his removal. 



Mr. Pond had been in active correspondence with Mr. 

 Crissey, Postmaster George F. Ketchum, the former editor 

 of the Warwick Valley Dispatch, and Mr. F. V. Sanford, 

 one of the leading citizens of the county, a descendant of 

 Thomas de Sandford of Salop, England, Companion in 

 Arms of William the Conqueror in 1066, and as we passed 



