and that his own lineage was honorable. He alluded specifically to Le
Ray de Chaumont and Joseph Bonaparte. These two men, and others their
countrymen, who had resided or sojourned upon the edge of the great
wilderness near his birthplace, had been his ideals from childhood. He
had often visited Lake Bonaparte, and had frequently seen the home
formerly occupied by Le Ray. While he had understood that he himself was
only plain Anthony C. Brown, the son of Thomas Brown (a white man who
had died some two months before his son's birth), he had yet an
impression that his mother was in some vague way connected with the
great personages whom he mentioned. How it was that Thomas Brown had
come to marry his mother, or what the details of her early life had
been, he did not know, being, in fact, ignorant of his family history.
He conceded that it might be only his own imagination that had led him
to suppose that he was in some indefinite way to be credited with the
greatness of those wealthy landed proprietors who had endeavored to
establish manorial estates or seigniories in the wilderness. He had come
to understand that this unexplainable impression of superiority and
connection with the great, which had always been with him in childhood
and early youth, was due to his mother's influence and teaching. There
was about it nothing direct and specific, and yet it had been instilled
into his mind, in indirect ways, until it was an integral part of his
existence. His mother had a farm and cattle and money. She was in better
circumstances than her neighbors. This had added to his feeling of
superiority and independence. The accident of a slight tinge of color
had hardly risen even to the dignity of a joke in the freedom of the
settlement and the forest. Looking back, he believed that his mother had
guarded his youthful mind against receiving any unfavorable impression
upon the subject. In his remote, free, wilderness home he had heard but
little of African slavery, and had regarded it as a far-off phantom,
like heathendom or witchcraft.