A Safe Investment

In the second year of the late civil war, I was married, and went to live with my husband in a small village on the Hudson, some fifty or sixty miles from New York. The house we occupied was a large, rambling mansion, of considerable antiquity for this country, and stood a little apart from the rest of the village, surrounded by broad fields, and commanding a glorious view of the river and hills of the Highlands. It had been built before the Revolution by my husband’s great grandfather, and, though destitute of many “Modern improvements,” was still a comfortable and pleasant residence.

My husband was a lawyer and a large real-estate owner in the neighborhood, and, at the period of which I write, was greatly perplexed, like many other persons in the North, by the perilous state of the times, and especially about the safe investment of his funds, as the suspension of specie payments, the great rise in gold, and the military disasters in Virginia, made it almost impossible to tell where it would be safe to deposit or to use one’s money in any large amount.

In the course of his transactions in real estate, it happened, one day, that he received what was for us a very large sum, about ten thousand dollars, which he brought home and placed in my charge, telling me at the same time that he should have to be absent during the evening attending to some business on the other side of the river, and should not be home till about midnight.

“You can place the money in the safe, dear,” he said, as he gave it to me, “and tomorrow I will try and find some way to invest it securely.”

So saying, he stepped into the buggy, which was standing at the door, and drove away, taking with him our hired man, Silas, and leaving me with no one in the house by Dinah, an old colored woman, who fulfilled in our modest household the functions of cook and… Read More