Excerpt: ?If there were nothing else to recall the day and date, December 14, 1780, I should still be able to name it because it chanced to be my twenty-second birthday, and Jack Pettus, of the Virginia Hundreds, and I were breaking a bottle of wine in honor of it in the bar of old Dirck van Ditteraick?s pot-house tavern at Nyack. The afternoon was cold and gray and dismal. The wine was prodigious...