our courtesy Aunt Catholina Van Olinda who kept the house with my elder
sister Althea, while I was dispatched for the time to my grandfather's
farm. I was very much at home on the farm and spent many happy days
there in early childhood, being regarded as a sort of heir apparent by
the principal personages there, namely, my grandfather, John Van Der Zee
the elder, and Tone and Cleo. The last named, Antony and Cleopatra, to
speak properly, were ancient negroes born and brought up on the farm and
rarely leaving it in all their long lives. They were slaves, inasmuch as
they disdained to be emancipated, and "free niggers" they looked down on
with contempt. They belonged to the Van Der Zee place and the place
belonged to them, and not to belong to anybody or to any place was, to
their apprehension, very like being a houseless and homeless pauper. As
I was John Van Zee the younger, according to their genealogy the natural
successor of Baas Hans, they extended to me assurances of their most
distinguished consideration. My father, Charles Sears, was not in the
line of succession, he being English or in other words a foreigner. They
tolerated him, partly because he spoke to them in Dutch, the only
language they knew or cared anything about, and partly because he was,
after all, a member of the family by marriage. As he always brought a
book in hand when visiting the farm, they made sure he was a
drukker--that is, a printer or bookseller or something of that vain and
frivolous description. Cleo attained great age, overrunning the century
mark. In her later years she came by inheritance to my mother, and so
rather curiously, it happened that while my father openly professed
anti-slavery sentiments, my mother was a slaveholder, presumably one of
the last of that class in the state of New York.

One of our neighbors in the Old Colonie was Thurlow Weed, the Boss of
the Whig party in the Empire State, and the founder, proprietor and
editor of the _Albany Evening Journal_, one of the most influential