Chapter 1

"And I--my joy of life is fled,
My spirit's power, my bosom's glow;
The raven locks that grac'd my head,
Wave in a wreath of snow!
And where the star of youth arose,
I deem'd life's lingering ray should close,
And those lov'd trees my tomb o'ershade,
Beneath whose arching bowers my childhood play'd."
MRS. HEMANS.

I was born in a valley not very remote from the sea. My father had
been a sailor in youth, and some of my earliest recollections are
connected with the history of his adventures, and the recollections
they excited. He had been a boy in the war of the revolution, and had
seen some service in the shipping of that period. Among other scenes
he witnessed, he had been on board the Trumbull, in her action with
the Watt--the hardest-fought naval combat of that war--and he
particularly delighted in relating its incidents. He had been wounded
in the battle, and bore the marks of the injury, in a scar that
slightly disfigured a face, that, without this blemish, would have
been singularly handsome. My mother, after my poor father's death,
always spoke of even this scar as a beauty spot. Agreeably to my own
recollections, the mark scarcely deserved that commendation, as it
gave one side of the face a grim and fierce appearance, particularly
when its owner was displeased.

My father died on the farm on which he was born, and which descended
to him from his great-grandfather, an English emigrant that had
purchased it of the Dutch colonist who had originally cleared it from
the woods. The place was called Clawbonny, which some said was good
Dutch others bad Dutch; and, now and then, a person ventured a
conjecture that it might be Indian. Bonny it was, in one sense at
least, for a lovelier farm there is not on the whole of the wide
surface of the Empire State. What does not always happen in this
wicked, world, it was as good as it was handsome. It consisted of
three hundred and seventy-two acres of first-rate land, either arable,
or of rich river bottom in meadows, and of more than a hundred of
rocky mountain side, that was very tolerably covered with wood. The
first of our family who owned the place had built a substantial
one-story stone house, that bears the date of 1707 on one of its
gables; and to which each of his successors had added a little, until
the whole structure got to resemble a cluster of cottages thrown
together without the least attention to order or regularity. There
were a porch, a front door, and a lawn, however; the latter containing
half a dozen acres of a soil as black as one's hat, and nourishing
eight or ten elms that were scattered about, as if their seeds had
been sown broad-cast. In addition to the trees, and a suitable
garniture of