Havin’ some business near Newark, recently, I passed the place where “The Cedars” used to be. By “The Cedars,” I mean the name they gave to the cottage where that queer, smart, unfortunate New York author, and well-known man, Henry William Herbert, used to hold forth.
“The Cedars” used to be one of the most talked about places around Newark or New York. The people pointed at it as if it was a show place, or a “haunted house.”
It stood on the banks of the Passaic river halfway between Newark and Belleville; it commanded originally a good view, and was right near a graveyard. This last fact would have been a serious objection in most folks’ eyes, but Herbert took the place just on account of the graveyard. “They wouldn’t undertake to ‘improve’ the dead,” he said to a friend when he took the place. Herbert didn’t like railroads or depots or modern “improvements” round his house; he wanted to be left to himself and his few chums, and he wanted a chance to have some good huntin’ grounds near him. So, as there was game around the old cemetery, Herbert bought the place at once. But with his usual cursed ill-luck–for ill-luck seemed to take hold of him sooner or later in everythin’–it turned out that the corporations of Newark and Belleville agreed to a “branch road” bein’ run between the two places, the road passin’ right along the graveyard. So, as Herbert afterwards remarked, “They couldn’t even leave death in peace.”
“The Cedars” was a queer affair, with a hall and staircase big enough for a palace, and a roof like a Swiss cottage, and small, bare rooms, with here and there a large comfortable room “thrown in.” The grounds were covered with cedars which Herbert had planted, and over the front piazza they are hung a big deer’s head, with the antlers spreadin’ wide, givin’ the whole front a sportin’, pleasant look at once.
About the funniest and nicest feature of “The Cedars” was its dogs. Herbert was very fond of dogs, and had ‘em all round the house and before its entrance. You couldn’t get to the house without passin’ a lot of dog kennels with dogs in ‘em. These dogs would all set up a howlin’ and a barkin’, and their noise would bring out the boss dog of the place, a dog called Sailor, who acted as porter, and watchman, and general factotum.
This Sailor was a decided character. He was known to everybody who knew his master. Sailor was a Newfoundland of enormous size, very strong, very gentle and very faithful, three things that not one man in a hundred possesses together, and not one woman in a thousand. Well, hearin’ the noise made by the other dogs when a stranger came to “The Cedars,” Sailor would step up to the visitor, and waggin’ his tail at him politely, would walk just a little ahead of him to the entrance of “The Cedars.” There, if he met his master or at any of the people of the house, he would, as it were, transfer the care of the stranger to them and relieve himself of any further responsibility. But if nobody happened to be in the house at the time, then Sailor, though still politely waggin’ his tail, would at the same time show his teeth and would bark, or even bite, if the stranger attempted to enter the house or take any liberties, till some one arrived.
Sailor at different times proved very useful in a very peculiar way, the most peculiar way, perhaps, a dog ever figured in. He saved a number of his master’s guests from ‘emselves–he saved their lives when they wanted to throw their lives away.
Herbert had often a hard drinkin’ crowd at “The Cedars,” and half a dozen times or so in the course of years his friends drank so hard as to get a fit of the delirium tremens. In these cases they generally would try to drown ‘emselves in the waters of the Passaic River, and then Sailor would rush into the water and pull ‘em out before they could drown.
It was a rather queer thing to have a dog always ready just to save drunken guests from killin’ ‘emselves, but that was precisely what Herbert kept Sailor for, and found him very useful in this peculiar capacity.
Sailor didn’t take any notice of of men goin’ into bathe in the ordinary way in the river. If two or three men came along, and either undressin’ or puttin’ on bathin’ clothes, took a bath, why, Sailor knew enough never to interfere. But of course these drunken guests of Herbert, when the fit was on ‘em, didn’t stop to undress, didn’t dream of puttin’ on bathin’ clothes, but rushed right down, with “the horrors” on ‘em, right into the river in their ordinary clothes. And in these cases Sailor always plunged in and saved his man, whether he wanted to be saved or not. Once one of Herbert’s chums, “seein’ snakes in his boots” and crazy with rum, rushed down into the Passaic. Sailor grappled him in the water, and then the man tried to drown the dog, and came very near doin’ it, too. At one time it seemed to Herbert, who had rushed down after his friend, as if the drunken wretch and the dog would drown together, so he plunged in and turned the curious fight in favor of the dog.
One of the main weaknesses about Herbert’s housekeepin’ at “The Cedars” was that there was no lady to keep the house. “Stag parties” are all very well for a while, but life gets to be very dull without the “deers” and “dears.” The female element is a mighty nice element about a house, but it was lackin’ at “The Cedars.” Herbert had two wives, but both his marriages were unhappy, though both of them were curious and rather romantic.
His first wife was a New England beauty by the name of Barker, the daughter of a rich Yankee in Maine. Herbert’s meetin’ with this lady was like everythin’ else that happened to him–peculiar.
He heard about her first from a chum of his, Joe Scoville. Joe was, himself, a noted and queer character. He had been secretary, at one time, to Calhoun, had been a merchant in New York and had been a scribbler for the New York papers. Well, Joe, on some sportin’ excursion up in Maine, had met and fallen in love with this pretty Miss Barker. But somehow Joe, though not particularly sheepish among men, was timid among women. So he looked and perhaps acted his love for the pretty Yankee girl, but didn’t speak it–to her, at least. But he spoke about it freely to his friend Herbert, whom he one day asked to go and see the lady and speak a good word for him by proxy. A man who is fool enough to make such a request as this of another man deserves to lose his love, and so Scoville lost his. Herbert, in one of his gunnin’ and fishin’ expeditions, called on the lady, but found out first that the lady didn’t like his friend Scoville a bit; second, that she did like him, Herbert, a good deal, and that he liked her.
So, beginnin’ by makin’ love for Joe Scoville, Herbert wound up by makin’ love for himself, and was accepted.
But the two didn’t get along together well after all when married, and within a few years the lady died of a surgical operation and a broken heart.
And then Herbert showed some of the queer features of his disposition. From the hour he buried his wife he became a devoted husband. Had he treated her half so well when livin’ as when dead, they would have been a happy couple.
He had a portrait painted of her by Inman, the artist, his friend, and he hung up this portrait in his library, and looked at it day and night, and sighed over it and went on about it at a great rate. Had he made as much fuss over the woman as he did over her picture, it would have been better all round.
His career with his second wife was even more unfortunate than with his first. He ended his first wife–but his second wife put an end to him. Yet he meant to do all right, I dare say, to both ladies, only he didn’t understand ‘em and they didn’t understand him.
He made the acquaintance of his second wife in a very sensational manner. There had been some strikes and labor troubles just then, and the mob didn’t like to have diamonds and silks flaunted in its face. One mornin’, while a gang of strikers were standin’ around Union Park, a young lady, elegantly dressed, was insulted by some of the men, who tried to rob her of her jewelry–”to buy bread with for their starvin’ families,” they said.
The lady was very much frightened, and screamed. Herbert happened to be passin’ by, and rushed to her assistance. The lady, of course, was very grateful, and Herbert took her to her residence. She turned out to be another pretty Yankee girl, a Miss Adela Budlong, of Providence, R. I.
Herbert married her, and as I have already alluded to elsewhere, had trouble with, and was for good reasons of her own, deserted by her.
This desertion led to Herbert’s suicide. He expected her to rejoin him–up to the last moment–but was disappointed.
The last scenes of Henry William Herbert’s life were very sad, strange and affectin’.
Expectin’ his wife to rejoin him he parted with her, with a long, close, tender embrace, at the rustic gate at “The Cedars,” which opened on the old cemetery. His wife then went, so she said, to her mother’s, while Herbert went to the Stevens House, New York, to engage rooms for her return.
It was just like Herbert to take the big paintin’ I have already described of his first wife as the great leadin’ feature of the furniture that he intended for the second wife’s rooms. This is precisely what he did–and at the Stevens House, day after day, beside his dead wife’s picture, he waited for the livin’ wife–she never came back again.
And when he discovered by accident that he would never see her more, that she was tryin’ to obtain a divorce from him, he wound up his sensational life but a strikin’ly curious and dramatic tableau.
He gave a dinner party, and when the banquet was over, and only one friend remained in the room, he stepped up in front of a mirror, drew a pistol, looked at himself with his pistol a moment, said to his friend, “I told you I would some day do it,” and did it–blew his brains out, and fell a dead man over his own dinner table–dyin’ from grief at the loss of his second wife by the picture of the first.
It was a stormy and remarkable endin’ of a stormy and remarkable life.
[Editor’s notes: While Herbert’s writings are not very accessible to modern readers, he had an enormous influence on sporting literature and generations of outdoorsmen and naturalists. His most famous work, The Warwick Woodlands, is a good-natured series of stories about hunting and camaraderie. It is set in the town of Warwick, New York–where the editor of this “Harry Hill’s Gotham” project resides. I transcribed The Warwick Woodlands for Project Gutenberg in the early 2000s, and recently gave a talk on Herbert’s career at our local library.
The Inman portrait of Sarah Barker remains a lost treasure. I’m fairly confident that it was part of an estate auction in England in the 1960s of the house of Herbert’s last close family descendants, but the records of the auction sales no longer exist. It may be that it was not recognized as an Inman at that time. The image on the page above was based on that portrait.]
