Page:Recollections of John Howard Redfield.djvu/29

Rh Middletown for a short period, and at one time had charge of the county jail. His grandchildren remembered him as occupying a pleasant residence on High street, on part of the ground now occupied by the Wesleyan University. There he had a fine garden, supplied with a great variety of fruit trees, no small attraction to the rising generation of that day, and it was his pride to furnish the earliest kitchen vegetables and the finest fruit of the neighborhood. He was fond of reading, and the large fund of information which he had acquired from this source and from his seafaring experience rendered his society agreeable to his juvenile visitors. Those were the days when Free Masonry was in its glory, and Captain Redfield held a prominent position among the members of the order, and I have seen those who remembered him as figuring in the public processions of the lodge, conspicuous by his venerable appearance as he carried the open Bible. His grandson (my father, of whom I shall have more to say), was in his boyhood attracted greatly by the mummery and parade of that pretentious fraternity, and amused himself by organizing mimic lodges among his playmates; but in his riper years he placed a truer value upon the ridiculous claims of the institution and became prominent in the political movement which was aroused by the kidnapping and murder of William Morgan for revealing the secrets of the order.