rchants of New
York, which traded with China and other foreign countries. This firm,
the senior members of which were the brothers Nicholas and Isaac
Gouverneur, was bound together by a close family tie, as Mrs. Peter
Kemble was Gertrude Gouverneur, a sister of the two Gouverneur brothers.
My intimacy with Margaret Tillotson Kemble, formed almost from the
cradle, lasted without a break throughout life. She was a second cousin
of my husband and married Charles J. Nourse, a member of the old
Georgetown, D.C., family. The last years of her life were entirely
devoted to good works. Her sister, Mary, married Dr. Frederick D. Lente,
at one time physician to the West Point foundry, at Cold Spring, N.Y.,
and subsequently a distinguished general practitioner in New York and
Saratoga Springs. Ellen Kemble, the other sister, of whom I have already
spoken, never married. She was eminent for her piety, and her whole life
was largely devoted to works of charity.

The Kemble house on Beach Street was always a social center and I think
I can truthfully say it was more than a second home to me. Mrs. William
Kemble, who was Miss Margaret Chatham Seth of Maryland, was a woman of
decided social tastes and a most efficient assistant to her husband in
dispensing hospitality. Gathered around her hearthstone was a large
family of girls and boys who naturally added much brightness to the
household. Mr. Kemble was a well-known patron of art and his house
became the rendezvous for persons of artistic tastes. It was in his
drawing-room that I met William Cullen Bryant; Charles B. King of
Washington, whose portraits are so well known; John Gadsby Chapman, who
painted the "Baptism of Pocahontas," now in the rotunda of the Capitol
at Washington; Asher B. Durand, the celebrated artist; and Mr. Kemble's
brother-in-law, James K. Paulding, who at the time was Secretary of the
Navy under President Martin Van Buren. Mr. Kemble was one of the
founders of the Century Club of New York, a life member of the Academy
of Design, and in 1817, at the age of twenty-one, in conjunction with
his older brother, Gouverneur Kemble, established the West Point
foundry, which for a long period received heavy ordnance contracts from
the United States government. The famous Parrott guns were manufactured
there. Captain Robert P. Parrott, their inventor and an army officer,
married Mary Kemble, a sister of Gouverneur and William Kemble, who in
early life was regarded as a beau