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When his kingly mansion was ready to be supplied with art treasures, such as ornamented the palaces of Europe, the ex-king sent across the ocean for costly paintings and beautiful sculpture with which to fill his new house; and if any crowned heads had happened to visit him, he would not have been ashamed to welcome them beneath his roof. People of royal blood–that is, the same kind of royal blood that he had–did come over to visit him. Louis Napoleon, afterward Emperor of France, came, when a young man, and spent some weeks with his uncle. While there, it is said, this young man went out shooting on the estate, and, finding the birds near the house easier to hit than those at a distance, he blazed away at any feathered creatures he saw in the garden, so that the gardener made a complaint.

But even then this young Louis Napoleon had begun to have dreams in regard to his succession to the imperial throne of France, and he did not like to be snubbed and scolded by an uncle who had had all the regal honors he was ever likely to get, and who therefore had no right to put on airs in his dealings with the prospective wearer of a crown. So there was a quarrel between the two, and there are reports to the effect that Louis Napoleon took revenge upon his uncle by cutting his fruit trees with a hatchet, without, however, imitating Washington in regard to subsequent truthfulness.

Besides visitors from abroad, many distinguished Americans visited the ex-king. Among these were Henry Clay, Daniel Webster, and John Quincy Adams. General Lafayette, also, when he came to this country, was received with great state by the Count de Survilliers, the title under which Joseph Bonaparte lived at Bordentown.

This ex-king never became an American citizen by taking out naturalization papers; but the Legislature of New Jersey treated him very well, and passed a resolution which enabled him to hold property in this State, and to thus become, in fact, a Jerseyman.

But although our ex-king was now established on the free soil of America, he did not feel altogether safe. His family had come to grief; and there was reason to fear, that, as a member of that family, England, or France, or Spain, might demand him as a prisoner, to be taken across the ocean to answer the charge of unlawful occupation of a throne.

It is quite possible that the people of the neighborhood imagined that the ex-king was in greater fear of molestation from his former royal brethren than was really the case. Their reasons for supposing that he was anxious to defend himself against surprise and capture had some ground, for there were some strange things about that ex-royal estate,–things that were not known in any other part of New Jersey. There was a tall building called a belvedere, from which the country and the river might be surveyed for a long distance in every direction; but, stranger far than that, there were subterranean passages which led from the house to unfrequented parts of the grounds. These passages were well built, arched with brick, and high enough for people to walk upright in them; and although persons of quiet and unimaginative minds thought that they were constructed for the purpose of allowing the occupants to go down to the lake or to the other portions of the grounds without getting wet if it should happen to be raining, there were many people who believed that for sudden showers a good stock of umbrellas would be cheaper and quite as useful, and that these costly passages could be meant for nothing else than to give opportunity for escape, in case foreign emissaries or officers of the law should come in search of an ex-king who was wanted on the other side of the Atlantic.

For whatever reason these passages were built, the spectacle of an ex-king, carrying a crown and his royal robes in a hand bag, slipping out from among some bushes to tramp along the dusty road to Trenton or Burlington, was never seen. Nobody ever thought it worth while to come to New Jersey to demand him or his property.