Near him, on a smooth part of a puncheon,
were the mildewed fragments of a letter, which he had been
arranging, as if to read its contents. Doubtless it was the same
letter brought to him by Rene de Ronville, as recorded in an early
chapter of our story. The fragments were gathered up and buried
with him. His dust lies under the present Church of St. Xavier,--
the dust of as noble a man and as true a priest as ever sacrificed
himself for the good of humanity.
In after years Simon Kenton visited Beverley and Alice in their
Virginia home. To his dying day he was fond of describing their
happy and hospitable welcome and the luxuries to which they
introduced him. They lived in a stately white mansion on a hill
overlooking a vast tobacco plantation, where hundreds of negro
slaves worked and sang by day and frolicked by night. Their oldest
child was named Fitzhugh Gaspard. Kenton died in 1836.
There remains but one little fact worth recording before we close
the book. In the year 1800, on the fourth of July, a certain
leading French family of Vincennes held a patriotic reunion,
during which a little old flag was produced and its story told.
Some one happily proposed that it be sent to Mrs. Alice Tarleton
Beverley with a letter of explanation, and in profound recognition
of the glorious circumstances which made it the true flag of the
great Northwest,
And so it happened that Alice's little banner went to Virginia and
is still preserved in an old mansion not very far from Monticello;
but it seems likely that the Wabash Valley will soon again possess
the precious relic.
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