t sixteen years and feeble constitution, managed to
enlist in the Army of Observation under General Greene; and from that
time on enjoyed a steady rise in health and prestige. In 1780, as a
captain in the Rhode Island forces in New Jersey under Colonel Angell,
he met and married Phebe Hetfield of Elizabethtown, whom he brought to
Providence upon his honorable discharge in the following year.

The young soldier's return was not a thing of unmitigated happiness. The
house, it is true, was still in good condition; and the street had been
widened and changed in name from Back Street to Benefit Street. But
Mercy Dexter's once robust frame had undergone a sad and curious decay,
so that she was now a stooped and pathetic figure with hollow voice and
disconcerting pallor--qualities shared to a singular degree by the one
remaining servant Maria. In the autumn of 1782 Phebe Harris gave birth
to a still-born daughter, and on the fifteenth of the next May Mercy
Dexter took leave of a useful, austere, and virtuous life.

William Harris, at last thoroughly convinced of the radically
unhealthful nature of his abode, now took steps toward quitting it and
closing it for ever. Securing temporary quarters for himself and his
wife at the newly opened Golden Ball Inn, he arranged for the building
of a new and finer house in Westminster Street, in the growing part of
the town across the Great Bridge. There, in 1785, his son Dutee was
born; and there the family dwelt till the encroachments of commerce
drove them back across the river and over the hill to Angell Street, in
the newer East Side residence district, where the late Archer Harris
built his sumptuous but hideous French-roofed mansion in 1876. William
and Phebe both succumbed to the yellow fever epidemic of 1797, but Dutee
was brought up by his cousin Rathbone Harris, Peleg's son.

Rathbone was a practical man, and rented the Benefit Street house
despite William's wish to keep it vacant. He considered it an obligation
to his ward to make the most of all the boy's property, nor did he
concern himself with the deaths and illnesses which caused so many
changes of tenants, or the steadily growing aversion with which the
house was generally regarded. It is likely that he felt only vexation
when, in 1804, the town council ordered him to fumigate the place with
sulfur, tar, and gum camphor on account of the much-discussed deaths of
four persons, presumably caused by the then diminishing fev