larger parlours embracing the whole depth of the house, with proportionate
widths, while the ceilings were higher than common, being eleven feet, if
we except the places occupied by the larger beams of the chamber floors.

As there was money in the family, besides the Neck, and the Littlepages had
held the king's commissions, my father having once been an ensign, and my
grandfather a captain, in the regular army, each in the earlier portion of
his life, we always ranked among the gentry of the county. We happened to
be in a part of Westchester in which were none of the very large estates,
and Satanstoe passed for property of a certain degree of importance. It is
true, the Morrises were at Morrisania, and the Felipses, or Philipses, as
these Bohemian counts were then called, had a manor on the Hudson, that
extended within a dozen miles of us, and a younger branch of the de Lanceys
had established itself even much nearer, while the Van Cortlandts, or a
branch of them, too, dwelt near Kingsbridge; but these were all people who
were at the head of the Colony, and with whom none of the minor gentry
attempted to vie. As it was, therefore, the Littlepages held a very
respectable position between the higher class of the yeomanry and those
who, by their estates, education, connections, official rank, and
hereditary consideration, formed what might be justly called the
aristocracy of the Colony. Both my father and grandfather had sat in the
Assembly, in their time, and, as I have heard elderly people say, with
credit, too. As for my father, on one occasion, he made a speech that
occupied eleven minutes in the delivery,--a proof that he had something to
say, and which was a source of great, but, I trust, humble felicitation in
the family, down to the day of his death, and even afterwards.

Then the military services of the family stood us in for a great deal, in
that day it was something to be an ensign even in the militia, and a far
greater thing to have the same rank in a regular regiment. It is true,