the Thames, and planted on the wilder borders of his own beautiful river
the Housatonic, which at Stratford enters the Sound. They were, probably,
the progenitors of all the weeping willows which are seen in this part of
the country, where they rapidly grow to a size which I have never seen
them attain in any other part of the world.

The younger of these Dr. Johnsons--for they both received the degree of
Doctor of Divinity from the University of Oxford--had a daughter
Elizabeth, who married Daniel Crommelin Verplanck, the son of Samuel
Verplanck, and the only fruit of their marriage was the subject of this
memoir. The fair-haired young mother was a frequent visitor with her child
to Stratford, where, under the willow trees from Twickenham, as appears
from some of her letters, he learned to walk. She died when he was but
three years old, leaving the boy to the care of his grandmother, by whom
he was indulgently yet carefully reared.

The grandmother is spoken of as a lively little lady, often seen walking
up Wall Street, dressed in pink satin and in dainty high heeled shoes,
with a quaint jewelled watch swinging from her waist. Wall Street was
then the fashionable quarter; the city, still in its embryo stater
extending but a little way above it; it was full of dwelling houses, with
here and there a church, which has long since disappeared. Over that
region of the metropolis where Mammon is worshipped in six days out of
seven, there now broods on Sunday a sepulchral silence, but then the walks
were thronged with churchgoers. The boy was his grandmother's constant
companion. He was trained by her to love books and study, to which,
however, he seems to have had a natural and inherited inclination. It is
said that at a very tender age she taught him to declaim passages from
Latin authors, standing on a table, and rewarded him with hot pound-cake.
Another story is, that she used to put sugar-plums near his bedside, to be