I did not change my name, but continued to be Douw Mauverensen. This was
at the wish of both Mr. Stewart and my mother, for the name I bore was an
honorable one. My father had been for years a clergyman in the Valley,
preaching now in Dutch, now in German, according to the nationality of the
people, and leading a life of much hardship, travelling up and down among
them. It is not my business to insist that he was a great man, but it is
certain that through all my younger years I received kindnesses from many
people because I was my father's son. For my own part I but faintly
remember him, he having been killed by a fractious horse when I was a very
small boy.

As he had had no fixed charge during life, but had ministered to half a
dozen communities, so it was nobody's business in particular to care for
his family after his death. The owner of the horse did send my mother a
bushel of apples, and the congregation at Stone Arabia took up a little
money for her. But they were all poor people in those days, wresting a
scanty livelihood from the wilderness, and besides, I have never noticed
that to be free with their money is in the nature of either the Dutch or
the Palatines. The new dominie, too, who came up from Albany to take my
father's place, was of the opinion that there was quite little enough
coming in for the living pastor, without shearing it, as he said, to keep
alive dead folk's memories. Thus sadly a prospect of great destitution
opened before my mother.

But she was, if I say it myself, a superior woman. Her father, Captain
Baltus Van Hoorn, had been a burgher of substance in old Dorp, until the
knavery of a sea-captain who turned pirate with a ship owned by my
grandfather drove the old gentleman into poverty and idleness. For years
his younger daughter, my mother, kept watch over him, contrived by hook or
by crook to collect his old credits outstanding, and maintained at least