THE STORY OF CORNWALLIS'S BUCKLES by Helen Burr Smith A few months ago the Society received as a gift from Miss Helen Burr Smith and the late Miss Henrietta Royer Smith a valuable pair of eighteenth-century silver knee buckles set with brilliants. The romantic story of how these buckles came into her family and how this story became a part of our Revolutionary tradition is told for us by one of the donors. ONE OF MY HAPPIEST and most vivid childhood recollections is of gathering with my brothers and sisters in a circle on the floor at our mother's feet on a rainy day to see the treasures she took one by one from a strongbox on these rare occasions. As she handed me one of a pair of brilliant buckles, I remember her saying "This is one of Cornwallis's knee buckles." Those words have lingered long in my memory but the full story of how Cornwallis's buckles came into our family's possession I learned only a comparatively few years ago, after the strongbox with its contents became the joint property of my sister and myself upon our mother's decease. The story was told us by a cousin of our mother's, the late William Ives Rutter, Jr., who had heard the story many times in childhood from his mother, Sarah May (Hobart) Rutter,1 who early in life had heard it from the lips of her great-grandmother, Ann Rudolph,2 to whom General Cornwallis had given the buckles when she was a little girl of between ten and twelve 1 Daughter of Henrietta Williamina (Smith) Hobajct and Robert Enoch Hobart, Jr., and wife of William Ives Rutter. 2 Daughter of Jacob and Judith (Yocum) Rudolph, and wife of William Moore Smith, son of the Reverend William Smith, D. D., first Provost of the University of Pennsylvania. 183