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A Song of a Single Note: A Love Story
A Song of a Single Note: A Love Story
PROLOGUE
"Love, its flutes will still be stringing,
Lovers still will sigh and kneel;
Freedom sets her trumpets ringing
To the clash of smiting steel."
So I weave of love and glory,
Homely toil, and martial show,
Fair romance from the grand story
Lived a century ago.
CHAPTER I.
RED OR BLUE RIBBONS
It was the fourth year of the captivity of New York, and the beleaguered city, in spite of military pomp and display, could not hide the desolations incident to her warlike occupation. The beautiful trees and groves which once shaded her streets and adorned her suburbs had been cut down by the army sappers; her gardens and lawns upturned for entrenchments and indented by artillery wheels; and some of the best parts of the city blackened and mutilated by fire. Her churches had been turned into prisons and hospitals, and were centres of indescribable suffering and poisonous infection; while over the burnt district there had sprung up a town of tents inhabited by criminals and by miserable wretches whom starvation and despair had turned into highwaymen.
But these conditions were the work of man. Nature still lavished upon the captive city a glory of sunshine and blue skies, and winds, full of the freshness and sparkle of the great sea, blew through all her sickly streets. Wherever the gardens had not been destroyed, there was the scent of mays and laburnums, and the indescribable beauty of apple blossoms on the first day of their birth.
In front of one of these fortunate enclosures, belonging to a little house on Queen Street, an old gentleman was standing, looking wistfully in at a trellis of small red roses. He turned away with a sigh as a man dressed like a sailor touched him on the arm, saying, as he did so:
"Well, then, Elder, a good afternoon to you? I am just from Boston, and I have brought you a letter from your son."
"You, De Vries! I didna look for you just yet."
"You know how it is. I am a man of experience, and I had a good voyage both ways."
"And Robertson and Elliot and Ludlow will have a good percentage on your cargoes?"
"That is the way of business. It is as it ought to be. I do not defraud or condemn the Government. It is the young – who have no knowledge or experience – who do such things."
"What do you bring in, Captain?"
"Some provisions of all kinds; and I shall take back some merchandise of all kinds – for them who can not get it in any other way."