lieving that their prisoner was safely confined for the night, departed to their homes; and as was their wont, went to bed early. Toward the dead hours of night, one who chanced to burn a midnight candle was startled to hear a tremendous crash in the direction of the warehouse, and rushing to his door he was just in time to see, by the light of a full moon, two weird figures leap from the building, a flash of ghostly white across the Bowling Green and the terrific speed of a white horse toward the North River, bearing aloft the haughty figure of the lord of Bohemia Manor. Straight across the deep, wide river did the faithful beast convey his master to the Jersey shore, thence across the wild country of New Jersey, over the Delaware River, back home to Cecil County, Maryland. Some of the more imaginative believe, perhaps, that the noble animal, like Dick Turpin’s horse which fell dead beneath the mighty tower of York Minster after conveying the highwayman hither from London in an overnight trip, perished when he brought his master to the very door of the Manor house; whilst others of a more humanitarian turn of mind assert that he lived many years thereafter, roaming, by special license, all the green meadows of Bohemia Manor,
“Where he and his master would frolic for hours,
Amidst the green grass and the tiny blue flowers.”
At any rate, it seems that Herrman buried the faithful horse in grand state and had a monument erected over his grave. Later a painting was made of Herrman and his horse, and this portrait with the engraving on the map are the only two likenesses we have of Augustine Herrman.[1]
- ↑ Various versions of the Story of Herrman and his horse exist among family traditions. One has it that under the pretense of exercising his horse in the confines of Fort Amsterdam, permission for which was permitted him, he caused the horse to leap through the embrasure from which one of the
