where sleeps the Lady Cornbury, dead
now as I tell this, hardly two hundred years. Also I was told of that
Lord Cornbury, her husband, once governor of the colony for his
relative, Queen Anne; and how he became so much more efficient as a
smuggler and a customs cheat, than ever he was as an executive, that
he lost in 1708 his high employment.

Because I had nothing more worthy to occupy my leisure, I
listened--somewhat listlessly, I promise you, for after all I was
thinking of the future not the past, and considering of the living
rather than those old dead folk, obscure, forgotten in their slim
graves--I listened, I say, wordlessly to my gray historian; and
somehow, after I was free of him, the one thing that remained alive in
my memory was the smuggling story of our Viscount Cornbury.

Among those few acquaintances I had formed during my brief
prosperity, was one with a gentleman named Harris, who had owned
apartments under mine on Twenty-second Street. Harris was elegant,
educated, traveled, and apparently well-to-do in riches. Busy with my
own mounting fortunes, the questions of who Harris was? and what he
did? and how he lived? never rapped at the door of my curiosity for
reply. One night, however, as we sat over a late and by no means a
first bottle of wine, Harris himself informed me that he was employed
in smuggling; had a partner-accomplice in the Customs House, and
perfect arrangements aboard a certain ship. By these last double
advantages, he came aboard with twenty trunks, if he so pleased,
without risking anything from the inquisitiveness or loquacity of the
officers of the ship; and later debarked at New York with the
certainty of going scatheless through the customs as rapidly as his
Inspector partner could chalk scrawlingly "O.K." upon his sundry
pieces of baggage.

Coming from Old Trinity, still mooting Cornbury and his smugglings, my
thoughts turned to Harris. Also, for the earliest time, I began to
consider within myself whether smuggling was not a field of business
wherein a pushing man might grow and reap a harvest. The idea came to
me to turn "free-trader." The government had destroyed me; I would
make reprisal. I would give my hand to smuggling and spoil the
Egyptian.

At once I sought Harris and over a glass of Burgundy--ever a favorite
wine with me--we struck agreement. As a finale, we each put in fifteen
thousand dollars and with the whole sum of thirty thousand dollars
Harris pushed for