526 
“Good Hunting 
5 ) 
III 
But, for my part, an annual pilgrimage 
to the scene of these delights would be a 
gratifying privilege, even without the fe- 
licity of friendship or the fun of shooting: 
An ancestral homestead, built half a cen- 
tury or so before the Revolution and oc- 
cupied by the direct descendants of the 
builder for at least a part of every year 
the land, so the story goes, on a gambling 
debt from a neighbor whose descendants, 
as it happens, are neighbors to this day. 
The latter still have on fading parchment 
the original grant for the whole tract from 
the royal William and Mary. “He re- 
mained an exile from his estate for seven 
years,” a local historian writes of William 
the Signer. “ The devastations committed 
on his property were very great.” But 
In the woods near the house ruffed grouse are found. — Page 525. 
since — except when the British occupied 
it, the family having fled for safety to a 
neighboring State. The William of that 
generation (for I suppose he would resent 
being called Billy as much as his present 
namesake would object to being called 
William) was too entirely well known and 
hated by the English to take any risks for 
his household, having already taken quite 
enough for himself by signing the Declara- 
tion of Independence and raising a regi- 
ment which he was now leading as a 
general in the field — a grim, determined 
William, judging from the portrait which 
hangs in the hall over the sword he fought 
with and the pen he also risked his life 
with — in order, I suppose, that his de- 
scendant and I might kill quail. . . . Well, 
William immortalized himself as a pa- 
triot, but I’d rather go shooting with Billy. 
William was of the fourth generation 
back from the present, and third down 
from the original ancestor who acquired 
fortunately, although the family silver, so 
carefully concealed, was never recovered, 
the old house itself, for it was old at the 
time of the Revolution, was not destroyed. 
With an added wing or two, in keeping 
with the rest, it remains to this day as it 
was then, a serene and dignified expression 
of early Colonial simplicity — long and low 
and lovable, well-proportioned rooms and 
many of them, low-ceiled, party-raftered, 
and with twenty-four small panes in each 
of the many old windows. 
Gleaming white against the dark pro- 
tecting woods to the north, nestling close 
to the ancestral sod, and caressed by an 
enormous linden-tree which towers high 
above the sturdy chimneys, the house 
smiles upon a wide expanse of velvet lawn, 
level as a billiard-table and undefiled by 
flower-beds or bushes. This is bound at a 
restful distance by a noble oak frame, also 
of ancestral planting. It is a mile or more 
to the water, and two vistas have been 
