enough of his business to ward the wolf from the door. It was only after
his death, and after her older sister Margaret had gone to Coeymans with
her husband, Kronk, that my mother married the elderly Dominie
Mauverensen. When he was so untowardly killed, fifteen years later, she
was left with eight children, of whom I, a toddling urchin, was among the
youngest. She had no money save the pittance from Stone Arabia, no means
of livelihood, nor even a roof of her own over her head, since the new
dominie made harsh remarks about her keeping him out of his own every time
he visited our village. To add to the wretchedness of her plight, at this
very time her sister Margaret came back in destitution and weakness to
her, having been both widowed and sorely shaken in wits by the small-pox.

It was then that Mr. Stewart, who had known my father, came to our relief.
He first lent my mother a small sum of money--she would take no more, and
was afterward very proud to repay him penny for penny. He further
interested Sir William Johnson, Mr. Douw Fonda, Mr. John Butler, and
others in the project of aiding her to establish a small school at Fort
Hunter, where little children might be taught pure Dutch.

This language, which I have lived to see almost entirely fade from use,
was even then thought to be most probably the tongue of the future in the
colony, and there was the more need to teach it correctly, since, by the
barbarous commingling of Rhenish peasant dialects, Irish and Scotch
perversions of English, Indian phrases, the lingo of the slaves, and the
curious expressions of the Yankees from the East, the most villanous
jargon ever heard was commonly spoken in our Valley. My mother knew the
noble language of her fathers in all its strength and sweetness, and her
teaching was so highly prized that soon the school became a source of
steady support to us all. Old "Uncle" Conrad--or Coonrod as we used to
call him--the high-shouldered old pedagogue who was at once teacher,