As it has been wellsaid by Macaulay, that the fusion of Norman and Saxon elements in the thirteenth century produced the Englami that has figured as a power in a wtirld of history, so that we may truly say that the fusion of English and French elements in this manorial tract, bought originally of the Indians by Thom;is Pell, Esq., in 16j4, confirmed by an English King, James II, iis a " lordship,'" in IfiST, produced a social growth of fine typal character, and furnished a contribution distinctively its own to the progress of American Colonial civilization.

"The incidental reference by name to an excellent lady who had passed the bonier line of ' three-score and ten ' before the nineteenth century began, recalls to mind one whose image is iuisociated with my earliest memories and with my first impressions of the primitive style of the cultivated Huguenot's life and numners. Madame Beslie, while in thought I replace her amid the old surroundings in Pellham, New Roclielle anil New York, reappears in my retrospective musing as I saw her often in my school days, a queenly woman of ninety-five years, not bent by age, retaining her natural ciise and grace of movement, still able by her winning ways to draw us young folk to her side as listener to her talk while she rehearsed the memories of her youth. The younger children of the family circle, us\ially speaking of her as 'Aunt Jlollie Bayley,' were obliged, each in turn, to take a lesson on the different spellings of French words that sound alike. When her memory became unretentive of things recent, it kept fresh as ever the things long past ; hence whensoever I greeted her after jibsences of a month or week, she would place her bands upon my temples, then kissing me upon the forehead, would pleasantly allude to the old French mode of salutation.