m, and descended the steps of the old stone house, never to
return.

[Illustration: _J. Patzig_

POMEROY PLACE]

Mrs. Pomeroy passed her later years at Edgewater, the home of her
grandson. Her death was typical of her life of piety. On a certain
afternoon seventy-five women were assembled for Lenten sewing. After
greeting them all in the drawing-room Aunt Pomeroy ascended the stairs
to her room, stretched herself upon the bed, and quietly drew her last
breath. In accordance with the old custom the clock in the death-chamber
was stopped, and a sheet was drawn over the mirror. Down stairs the
rector of the parish read a prayer, and the women filed out of the house
in silence.

Pomeroy Place was not permanently lost to the family for which it was
originally built. When the centennial of the building was celebrated in
1904, the house had already returned to its first estate, having been
purchased by the granddaughter of the original owners, Mrs. George Stone
Benedict, who with her daughter, Clare Benedict, came to occupy it as
their American home between journeys abroad.

Mrs. Benedict's sister, Constance Fenimore Woolson, who made many summer
visits in Cooperstown, may be said to have drawn her original literary
inspiration from this region, for Otsego appears in her first work, "The
Haunted Lake," published in December, 1871, in _Harper's Magazine_,
while Pomeroy Place itself is commemorated in one of her earliest
productions, "The Old Stone House." From this period till her death in
1893 the sketches, poems, and novels that came from Miss Woolson's pen
reached such a level of literary art that Edmund Clarence Stedman called
her one of the leading women in the American literature of the century.
Miss Woolson spent the latter years of her life in Europe, changing her
residence frequently. Gracefully impulsive and independent, she had a
gypsy instinct for the roving life of liberty out-of-doors; yet in
character and demeanor she was so serenely poised, so self-contained,
with such inviolable reserve and dignity, that she was, as Stedman put
it, "like old lace."

* * * * *

One of the most remarkable men of early times in Cooperstown was Elihu
Phinney, publisher of the _Otsego Herald_, who had brought his presses
and type here in the winter of 1795, breaking a track through the snow
of the wilderness with six teams of horses. The first number of the
_Otsego Herald, or Western Advertise