otice of President Madison,
who summoned Paulding to Washington for eight years as Secretary of
the Board of Navy Commissioners. During those eight years he wrote
_The Backwoodsman_ his longest poem and the one which he liked best of
all, a liking not generally shared by his readers; the second series
of _Salmagundi_; and _Koningsmarke_.

Having married Gertrude, the sister of his friend and companion
Gouverneur Kemble, his days were moving smoothly along when the death
of his wife's father took him again to New York and he went to live in
what had long been the home of "The Patroon." This was a mansion of
solid type in Whitehall Street, corner of Stone, set in the midst of a
wide-spreading garden, a site blurred out in later days by the Produce
Exchange. Here he lived during the fourteen years he acted as Navy
Agent at New York, devoting his evenings to literary work, writing his
most successful book, _The Dutchman's Fireside_, also _John Bull in
America_, _Tales of the Good Woman_, and _Westward Ho!_ In the evening
he went often to the Park Theatre, and came to know James H. Hackett,
the greatest Falstaff America had seen, writing for him _The Lion of
the West_, which Hackett acted for many years. And then after fifteen
years in this house he left it, and with his family went to Washington
as Secretary of the Navy.

Once more, in 1841, he returned to New York, to live in Beach Street,
then the fashionable St. John's Park neighborhood. But, his wife dying
before he was really settled, he soon left New York and passed the
last days of his life in Dutchess County, the region of his birth.

At about the time Paulding moved into the State Street house two young
men met one afternoon at the home of a mutual friend. One was
studying medicine and beginning to see something more in life than a
struggle for mere existence. He was Joseph Rodman Drake. The other,
Fitz-Greene Halleck, was a bookkeeper and had but just come from his
birthplace in Guilford, Connecticut. He had read much poetry and had
written some stray verse. A few days after their meeting, the two came
together again in the rooms where Halleck boarded in Greenwich Street,
not half a dozen houses from the place where Washington Irving was
living with Mrs. Brandish. The second meeting was the real start of an
inseparable friendship which has caused them to be looked upon as the
Orestes and Pylades of American poets.

Halleck had begun his work for Jacob Barker.