were of the usual type of the immigration of that particular place and
time. They included Welsh and English Quakers, an Irishman,--with a
Celtic name, and apparently not a Quaker,--and peace-loving Germans,
who were among the founders of Germantown, having been driven from their
Rhineland homes when the armies of Louis the Fourteenth ravaged
the Palatinate; and, in addition, representatives of a by-no-means
altogether peaceful people, the Scotch Irish, who came to Pennsylvania
a little later, early in the eighteenth century. My grandmother was a
woman of singular sweetness and strength, the keystone of the arch in
her relations with her husband and sons. Although she was not herself
Dutch, it was she who taught me the only Dutch I ever knew, a baby
song of which the first line ran, "Trippe troppa tronjes." I always
remembered this, and when I was in East Africa it proved a bond of union
between me and the Boer settlers, not a few of whom knew it, although at
first they always had difficulty in understanding my pronunciation--at
which I do not wonder. It was interesting to meet these men whose
ancestors had gone to the Cape about the time that mine went to America
two centuries and a half previously, and to find that the descendants
of the two streams of emigrants still crooned to their children some at
least of the same nursery songs.

Of my great-grandfather Roosevelt and his family life a century and over
ago I know little beyond what is implied in some of his books that have
come down to me--the Letters of Junius, a biography of John Paul Jones,
Chief Justice Marshall's "Life of Washington." They seem to indicate
that his library was less interesting than that of my wife's
great-grandfather at the same time, which certainly included such
volumes as the original _Edinburgh Review_, for we have them now on our
own book-shelves. Of my grandfather Roosevelt my most vivid childish
reminiscence is not something I saw, but a tale that was told me