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The Green Bag. ■
singing, especially in the livelier airs : although the fear of imprisonment would unquestionably deepen his seriousness in the graver parts of the drama. But one thing at least is certain; his songs will be neither comic nor semi-serious while he remains confined in the dismal cage, the debtor's prison at New York. I will therefore proceed to inquire whether the complainant had any legal right thus to change that character of his native warblings, by such a confinement, before the appointed season for the dramatic season had arrived." If the Chancellor could have read " Bleak House," he would have learned that caging did not affect the vocal spirits of Miss Flite's canaries. In personal appearance the Chancellor was not imposing. He was small and lean, and in his last years he wore his iron gray hair and beard long and rather unkempt. His face was seamed and furrowed with thought and mental toil, and his eyes were keen. His face was somewhat Jacksonian. He was one whose spirit "o'er informed the tenement of clay." He was however always physically active and energetic. In the younger days he had been a great jumper, and so late as 1 S3 5 he astonished some of his grave and famous guests by leaping over the backs of the parlor chairs. (He must have recovered from the haycart accident.) He was fond of horseback riding, and Mr. Stone tells us he once owned a favorite horse, and rode him dressed in a homespun suit which he wore so many years that horse and rider became of the same color, and he had the appearance of a farmer on a ploughhorse. He was also fond of " running with the machine " to fires, and was a sort of selfconstituted chief of the fire department. This consorted w ell with his habit of " total abstinence." When the old United States Hotel at Saratoga was burned, he was on the roof actively directing matters, at the age of nearly eighty. It was his habit early in the evening to play cards, chess or back gammon with his family and his guests, and then to study and work all night, often until three or four o'clock in the morning. He
was one of the most genial, kind-hearted and sociable of men, a good story-teller and a hearty laugher. He was president of the American Temperance Union, and widely celebrated for his devotion to the cause of "temperance." Mr. Seward consequently caused a great sensation once by declaring that the Chancellor and a certain well-known statesman of New York drank more brandy and water than any two other men in the State. When this statement was challenged he justified it by explaining that the states man drank the brandy and the Chancellor the water. As the traveler from the south approaches Saratoga Springs on the railroad he will hardly fail to see on the right at the southern outskirt a large but unpretending house of gray stone, situated in a grove of tall pine trees. This is " Pine Grove," the Chancellor's residence from 1833 until his death — a third of a century. The grove extended on both sides of the street or road, and the southern part was a public pleasure ground, including a bowling-alley, a form of amusement which does not seem to have aroused the Chan cellor's hostility as it did that of his famous fellow-townsman and contemporary, Judge Esek Cowen, who judicially pronounced a bowling-alley a nuisance. In this man sion Walworth exercised a simple and pa triarchal hospitality, gathering around the great men of the country who visited Sara toga. He, like Abou Ben Adhem, was one who loved his fellowmen, and he delighted in cultivating a familiar intercourse with them. Of his life at Pine Grove, Mr. Stone gives the following graphic account : — "Few residences in the land have seen more of the great celebrities of the country, especially of her distinguished jurists and statesmen. It has known Daniel D. Tompkins, De Witt, Clinton, Martin Van Buren, Enos T. Throop, Silas Wright, Churchill C. Cambreling, William L. Marcy, Albert H. Tracy, Francis Granger, William H. Seward, Stephen A. Douglas, Millard Fillmore, James Buchanan, Chancellor Kent, Judge Story, Judge Grier, Washington Irving, James Fenimore
