o other will in the Philipse household able to cope
with Elizabeth's. She held that the thing was most practicable and
simple, inasmuch as the steward, with the aid of two servants, kept
the deserted house in a state of habitation, and as her mother's
sister, Miss Sarah Williams, was living with the widow Babcock in the
parsonage of Lower Philipsburgh and could transfer her abode to the
manor-house for the time of Elizabeth's stay. Major Colden, an unloved
lover,--for Elizabeth, accepting marriage as one of the inevitables,
yet declared that she could never love any man, love being admittedly
a weakness, and she not a weak person,--was ever watchful for the
opportunity of ingratiating himself with the superb girl, and so
fearful of displeasing her that he dared not refuse to ride with her.
He was less able even than her own family to combat her purpose. One
day some one had asked him why, since she called him Jack, and he was
on the road to thirty years, while she was yet in her teens, he did
not call her Betty or Bess, as all other Elizabeths were called in
those days. He meditated a moment, then replied, "I never heard any
one, even in her own family, call her so. I can't imagine any one ever
calling her by any more familiar name than Elizabeth."

Now it was not from her father that this regal young creature could
have taken her resoluteness, though she may well have got from him
some of the pride that went with it. There certainly must have been
more pride than determination in Frederick Philipse, third lord of the
manor, colonel in provincial militia before the Revolution, graduate
of King's College, churchman, benefactor, gentleman of literary
tastes; amiable, courtly, and so fat that he and his handsome wife
could not comfortably ride in the same coach at the same time. But
there was surely as much determination as pride in this gentleman's
great-grandfather, Vrederyck Flypse, descendant of a line of viscounts
and keepers of the deer forests of Bohemia, Protestant victim of
religious persecution in his own land, immigrant to New Amsterdam
about 1650, and soon afterward the richest merchant in the province,
dealer with the Indians, ship-owner in the East and West India trade,
importer of slaves, leader in provincial politics and government,
founder of Sleepy Hollow Church, probably a secret trafficker with
Captain Kidd and other pirates, and owner by purchase of the territory
that was erected by royal charter of Wi