P., and Lady Warren so splendidly brought out her daughters that
Charlotte married Willoughby, Earl of Abingdon, and Ann wed Charles
Fitzroy, Baron Southampton. The youngest girl, Susanna, chose a
colonel named Skinner,--and New York, still affectionately inclined
toward the Admiral's daughters, named streets after the husbands of
all three! Our present Christopher Street used to be Skinner Road;
Fitzroy Road ran northward, near our Eighth Avenue from Fourteenth
Street far uptown; Abingdon Road, which was known colloquially and
prettily as "Love Lane," was far, far out in the country until much
later, somewhere near Twenty-first Street. Abingdon Square alone
preserves one of the old family names, and in Abingdon Square I am
certain some of those dear ghosts come to walk.
And still I find that I have not told the half of Sir. Peter's story! I
have not told of his adventures in the Mohawk country, where he
travelled from sheer love of adventure and danger in the first place,
and afterward established a fine settlement and plantation; of his
placing there his sister's young son, William Johnson, later to be a
great authority on matters pertaining to the Indians, and how he sent
him out vast consignments of "rum and axes," to open negotiations
with the Mohawks; how in his letter to his nephew he sounded a note of
true Irish blarney, in cautioning him not to find fault with the
horses supplied by a certain man, "since he is a relation of my
wife's!" I have not told of his narrow escape from the Indians on one
dramatic occasion; nor of his trip to the West Indies as an envoy of
peace; nor of his services in Barbadoes which caused the people
thereof to present him with a gorgeous silver monteith, or punch-bowl;
nor of the mighty dinner party he gave at which the Rev.
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