CHAPTER I

CHILDHOOD

TOWARDS the close of the eighteenth century a German clockmaker named
Engel Freund, accompanied by his wife and children, left his native
town of Elberfeld, in Rhenish Prussia, to seek a new home in America.
There is a family tradition to the effect that his forefathers were
French, and that they came into Germany on account of some internal
commotion in their own country. The name makes it more probable that
they were Alsatians who quietly moved across the Rhine, either when
their province was first ceded to France, or perhaps later, at the
time of the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, in 1685. When Engel
Freund quitted Germany the disturbing influences of the French
Revolution may have had a considerable share in determining his
departure. He landed at New York in 1797 and established himself in
Hester Street, between Christie and Forsyth.

His wife, born Ann Elizabeth Schneider, in 1764, was a native of
Frankenburg, Hesse Cassel. She became the mother of a son and several
daughters, who attained maturity and settled in New York. As his
girls grew into womanhood and married, Engel Freund, who was a
thrifty and successful tradesman in his prime, dowered each of them
with a house in his own neighborhood, seeking thus to perpetuate in
the new the kindly patriarchal customs of the old land.

To the New-Yorker of to-day, or, indeed, to any reputable and
industrious immigrant, the notion of settling a family in Hester