severe in winter, the mercury often dropping to 30 deg. below, though we
then had no thermometer to measure it, and the summers, at an altitude
of two thousand feet, cool and salubrious. The soil was fairly good,
though encumbered with the laminated rock and stones of the Catskill
formation, which the old ice sheet had broken and shouldered and
transported about. About every five or six acres had loose stones and
rock enough to put a rock-bottomed wall around it and still leave enough
in and on the soil to worry the ploughman and the mower. All the farms
in that section reposing in the valleys and bending up and over the
broad-backed hills are checker-boards of stone walls, and the right-
angled fields, in their many colours of green and brown and yellow and
red, give a striking map-like appearance to the landscape. Good crops of
grain, such as rye, oats, buckwheat, and yellow corn, are grown, but
grass is the most natural product. It is a grazing country and the dairy
cow thrives there, and her products are the chief source of the incomes
of the farms.

I had come into a home where all the elements were sweet; the water and
the air as good as there is in the world, and where the conditions of
life were of a temper to discipline both mind and body. The settlers of
my part of the Catskills were largely from Connecticut and Long Island,
coming in after or near the close of the Revolution, and with a good
mixture of Scotch emigrants.

My great-grandfather, Ephraim Burroughs, came, with his family of eight
or ten children, from near Danbury, Conn., and settled in the town of
Stamford shortly after the Revolution. He died there in 1818. My
grandfather, Eden, came into the town of Roxbury, then a part of Ulster
County.