Page:Daughters of Genius.djvu/216

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208 THE WIFE OP BENEDICT ARNOLD. agreeable to her. Arnold received some compensation in rmney and in military rank from the British government; but men of honor would not know him, and he was frequently insulted. His wife shared the mortification which such slights inflicted. Of her subsequent life, history gives us but a few faint glimpses. One of these shows her standing at his side in West- minster Abbey before the monument erected by the king to the memory of her old friend Major Andre, reading the inscription that told of his untimely death — due, indeed, if Burr's story be true, in large measure to her influence. The reader has, perhaps, seen, or will see, the monu- ment to Andre" in Westminster Abbey. It has a very insignificant appearance, but the name in the inscription arrests every American eye, and the few words accom- panying it impress every American mind : " Sacred to the Memory of Major John Andre, who, raised by his merit, at an early period of life, to the rank of Adjutant-General of the British Forces in America, and employed in an important but hazardous enterprise, fell a sacrifice to his zeal for his king and country, on the second of October, 1780, aged twenty-nine ; universally bel6ved and esteemed by the army in which he served, and lamented even by his foes. His gracious Sovereign, King George the Third, has caused this monument to be erected." Mrs. Arnold returned at length to her native country. Her husband dead, her children mature and settled in life, she left a country where her illusions had been de- stroyed and her hopes unfulfilled, and came home to die. To America she came, but not to her old family home in Philadelphia ; not to her relatives and friends — if any friends there remained to her. She did not enter Penn- sylvania. She preferred to remain in Massachusetts, the state where an ancestor of hers had been publicly whipped