Littlepage is not a bad name, in itself, and I trust they who do me the
favour to read this manuscript, will lay it down with the feeling that the
name is none the worse for the use I have made of it.

I have said that both my father and grandfather, each in his day, sat in
the assembly; my father twice, and my grandfather only once. Although we
lived so near the borough of West Chester, it was not for that place they
sat, but for the county, the de Lanceys and the Morrises contending for the
control of the borough, in a way that left little chance for the smaller
fishes to swim in the troubled water they were so certain to create.
Nevertheless, this political elevation brought my father out, as it
might be, before the world, and was the means of giving him a personal
consideration he might not have otherwise enjoyed. The benefits, and
possibly some of the evils of thus being drawn out from the more regular
routine of our usually peaceable lives, may be made to appear in the course
of this narrative.

I have ever considered myself fortunate in not having been born in the
earlier and infant days of the colony, when the interests at stake, and the
events by which they were influenced, were not of a magnitude to give the
mind and the hopes the excitement and enlargement that attend the periods
of a more advanced civilization, and of more important incidents. In this
respect, my own appearance in this world was most happily timed, as any one
will see who will consider the state and importance of the colony in the
middle of the present century. New York could not have contained many less
than seventy thousand souls, including both colours, at the time of my
birth, for it is supposed to contain quite a hundred thousand this day on
which I am now writing. In such a community, a man has not only the room,
but the materials on which to figure; whereas, as I have often heard him
say, my father, when he was born, was one of less than half of the smallest