FOREWORD

To my dear nieces and nephews and their children:

     This little book is for you, but it has been written quite
as much for my own pleasure as for yours.  How can anybody over
sixty resist the temptation to write her reminiscences for a
captive audience?

     When we are young we are far less interested in where we
came from than in where we are going.  This is natural and right,
when there is a long road ahead.  But when we begin to look back
and see the longer road behind, we find that how we came to be
the people we are is partly due to who our parents and
grandparents were, what they thought and how they lived.
Although each individual must follow the pattern of his own life,
it often helps to make things clearer if we know something about
those who came before us.

     Earlier generations lived with their past in a way that is
almost wholly forgotten today.  Even in the last century some
families occupied the same house for a hundred years or more, and
sons and daughters who went out from the home often remained
within reach of parents and grandparents.  Most households
consisted of three generations, and births and deaths took place
at home, so there was a sense of continuity through awareness of
the processes of nature.  Now there is a constant shifting of
families from place to place, and usually there is no old home to
go back to.  In America, especially, many people have lost all
connection with their roots, and with it have lost the sense of
their own relation to history, which can be a help in keeping
one's balance in a gyrating world.  I am glad that this is not so
with you.  Although your homes are as far apart as California and
Norway, I know that you still care to hold onto the thread that
binds us together in a common inheritance.

     It is inevitable, I'm afraid, that my personal vision has
colored this account of our family life.  If it had been written
by Kathrina or Garrat the story might have sounded quite
different, though the essential facts would remain the same.  I
have attempted neither a chronicle of family events nor a
biography of any of its members.  If you do not find a complete
portrait of your mother or father, grandmother or grandfather,
please remember that a little sister has a limited view, and that
she stands too close to her brother and sister to see them
without blurring.  If you feel, however, that this picture of our
home at a particular period seems real, and that the figures in
it are alive, I shall have achieved my aim in writing this
sketch.
                               -1-

                                I.

     Let's go back to the closing years of the nineteenth century
and take the Hudson River ferry boat from New York to New Jersey,
step into the waiting train at Hoboken and go to visit the Van
Wagenen family in South Orange, where Kathrina, Garrat and
Theodora lived as children.  Everybody came by train because
there were no automobiles, and it took forty minutes to Mountain
Station, the part of South Orange where they lived.  At the time
we have chosen Kathrina, who was called Kina because her younger
brother couldn't pronounce her name, was fourteen and a half, and
already had a serious look in her big brown eyes and wore her
dark hair combed straight back into a thick braid down to her
waist.  Garrat was a handsome boy not quite thirteen, who carried
his chin high and looked more devil-may-care than he really was.
Theodora, recently turned seven, was a mousy child usually seen
in retreat.  She was kindly encouraged by her big sister, whose
abilities set a standard for her in all things, but whose
occasional lapses into unbecoming behavior sent her shrinking
into a corner, her idol shaken, though never shattered.

     Their father, Bleecker, was a quiet, dignified man of fifty,
slender but straight, who wore eye-glasses, and whose carefully
trimmed beard was already beginning to show gray.  Their mother,
Kate, seven years younger, whose straight brown hair had never
met a curling iron and whose finely formed nose had never known a
speck of powder, still looked fresh and young in spite of rather
insecure health.  They had moved out from New York when the older
children were still small, and Theodora was born at "Lawnhurst",
where the windows overlooked meadows in which cows still grazed.

     If we have luggage with us we can take a "hack" from the
line of vehicles in the station yard, where the single patient
horse attached to each carriage waits with hanging head while the
driver bids for passengers as they come down the platform,
raising and expectant finger to likely customers and chanting
"Keb, Karridge", in subdued tones.  But if we have no bags we can
walk in a few minutes to the gait on the side street, where a
gravel path, covered in winter by a boardwalk, leads to the
house.  In the memory of the youngest member, this is how the
place looked and what the family life was like.

     The house had a face, a big friendly face.  The nose, I
admit, was negligible, but there was no doubt about the large,
somewhat protruding eyes, formed by two wide windows in the
second story, set out a little from the wall with narrow, sloping
roofs and supports like upper and lower eyelids.  There was no
doubt, either, of the grin below, where the veranda, set in under
the upper stories and furnished with columns and railings
suggestive of teeth, ran the full width of the house.  In fact,
aside from the absence of ears, the front of the house looked a
good deal like the Cheshire Cat.   This peculiarity was due to
alterations made before I was born, when its two- story Mansard
character was wiped out, and it became a three-story hip-roofed
anomaly.

                               -2-

     Kathrina remembered the rain dripping on her bed when a
storm came up when the roof was being raised.  On one side a sort
of pagoda-top nestled against the roof, providing a cheerful
chamber known as the tower room.  On the ground floor two deep
bay windows jutted out on each side, so that sometimes one could
see from the library what was going on in the kitchen.  The house
was painted a warm brown with cream colored trimmings, and doors
and shutters of dark green, and it was a perfectly satisfying
house to those who lived in it.

     To the south side a wide lawn lay between the house and the
main street, Montrose Avenue.  A fence of square posts and rails,
painted to match the house, ran the whole length of the property
on the front and along the side street to the east.  On the west
the ground sloped away to a narrow meadow that bordered a
somewhat dismal brook known as the Black Necktie.  In the winter
this modest hillside provided fine sledding for the neighborhood
children.  The steps at the west end of the veranda were for
arrivals by carriage, for at that side the driveway made a great
sweeping arc from street to house to stable, whence it returned
to the entrance by a more direct and lowly route under the slope,
forming a great island that offered figured in our play.  The
whole driveway was covered with crushed bluestone, the sharp
edges of which made severe bruises when a child had a fall.
Kathrina had occasion to remember this most poignantly because of
the time the ponies saddle girth broke and, clinging with her
usual determination to the reins, she was dragged for a
considerable distance along the gravel.

     Tall forest trees, chestnut and oak, bordered the driveway
from the street to the house, and on the island was a clump of
pines and another of Norway spruce with long sweeping branches.
In the middle of the lawn rose an enormous sycamore whose peeling
bark, broad leaves and seed balls made plenty of work for Frank,
the gardener, but also provided delightful materials with which
to play.

     All these features of the place could be seen at a glance
before going into to the house. We'll put off further exploration
and enter the front door, which led into a long hall straight
through the middle of the house.  The first room on the right was
the family living room, called the library.  It had an alcove
lined with books from floor to ceiling, and between the door and
the alcove was a corner fireplace over which was set into the
wall a portrait of Kathrina and Garrat at five and a half and
four.  The big bay window gave plenty of light, and the sofas and
chairs, covered in brown corduroy, were deep and comfortable.  A
large oriental rug and several smaller ones covered the floor,
and the curtains were of shimmering India silk in coppery tones.
Hot air from the furnace came up through a register near the
door, and on a low chair beside it Mother loved to sit and toast
her toes.
                               -3-

     Beyond the library, and set in behind it was the stairway,
with a turn at the foot and another at the head that added
excitement to a slide down its polished rail.  Under the stairs
was a low door that led to the kitchen department, and beside it
hung the dinner bell, suspended from a bracket and consisting of
three Japanese gongs in graduated sizes and a padded stick in
which to strike them.

     Opposite the library was the parlor, a rather formal room
reserved for company, with green damask upholstery and an ebony
cabinet containing objets d' art and curios.  Over the fireplace
hung a large painting called "The Training of the Surf Horse", in
which the wild eye and tossing mane of the powerful animal and
the muscular nude figure of the rider struck a note not quite
consistent with the tame amenities of the room.  Wide doorways
hung with portiers opened into the hall and formed a vista
through a middle room, where the grand piano stood, into the
dining room.  This was an addition, made when the house was being
altered.  It was an architectural triumph of the 1880's, with
high oak wainscoting, a William Morris wallpaper above it, and a
monumental chimney piece of columns, mirrors and niches
surmounting a tiled fireplace where in cold weather cannel coal
was burned in an open grate.  On a corner of the oak sideboard
stood a silver pitcher, always filled with water from the well
beside the house -water from the pipes was not considered
safe-and a silver goblet from which we all drank indiscriminately
whenever we were thirsty.  The silver rim gave it a special taste
never found in water from a glass.

     Next to the dining-room, at the end of the hall, was the
butler's pantry, where the waitress lurked during meals, to be
summoned by a little silver bell for a change of plates, and
where she washed the dishes and put them away in glass-fronted
cupboards.  There was no door from the pantry to the kitchen, to
discourage talking during meals, but a revolving dumb-waiter
brought the food to be served and removed the empty dishes.  It
was large enough to accommodate a child, folded up on the lower
shelf, who might be whirled around in momentary blackness and
delivered to a surprised person at the other side.  Proper
arrival in the kitchen was by a windowless passage lined with
doors.  The first two doors, right and left were best left
closed, for behind one were the cellar stairs, steep and dim, and
behind the other was the "dark closet", probably containing
nothing more formidable that brooms and stepladders, but which
imagination could fill with dragons or Bluebeards wives.  Turning
a corner one came to the more inviting preserve closet, where a
pane of glass in the door let a little light into the passage and
showed the neat rows of glasses and jars on the shelves.  Next to
it was the store closet where all the ingredients were kept for
the making of the cakes, pies and puddings, including a barrel of
flour and another of sugar, as well as a great stone jug of dark
molasses.  On a shelf under the window lay the bread board, and
here the dough might be seen and smelled rising in the pan a
couple of times a week.

                               -4-

     In the kitchen itself the dominating feature was the great
cast iron range built into a wide brick chimneypiece, and over it
hung an iron hood to carry off the coal fumes and the odors of
cooking.   In the darkest corner of the room stood an iron sink,
in which, in my memory, there stood perpetually a dishpan full of
greasy water- but this is doubtless an exaggeration by the mind
of an over-fastidious child, and should not be set down to the
discredit of Katie, our conscientious Scotch cook.  The merry
whirling dumb waiter, the purr of the kettle always on the range,
the loud ticking of the banjo clock and the inviting table in the
bay window, covered with a red and white checked tablecloth, more
than compensated for the nauseous dish water, and many high
moments were enjoyed in the kitchen, such as the delight of the
scraping the remains from the huge yellow pottery bowl in which
cake was mixed.

     A cup of tea by the sunny window was part of each day's
program in the kitchen for Katie, Maggie our devoted Irish nurse,
and the waitress.  Often a cup of cambrick tea was added for a
child.  Two or three days a week an extra cup was set out for
Mrs. Ryan the laundress, for we used immense numbers of clothes
that had to be washed by hand in the big soapstone tubs
downstairs.  Mrs. Ryan's realm, a large room opening off the
cellar, had it's own special atmosphere compounded of steam, coal
gas from the stove where the household linen was boiled and the
irons heated, and mingled odors of brown soap, starch, wax, and
Mrs. Ryan.  At all seasons dressed in faded calico, she labored
up the steps with great baskets full of wet clothes to be hung
outdoors.  The clothes yard was laid out in a large square with
diagonals, and boardwalks were set under the lines in winter.
When there was no washing out these made fine tracks for an
imaginary trolley car in which a child could ride on her running
legs, with one arm extended high to reach the clothesline.  I
never knew where Mrs. Ryan lived or whom she met after she had
laid the last neatly folded garment in the basket to be carried
upstairs, and I could not picture her in any other setting than
the one in which she functioned with professional skill in our
basement laundry.

                               -5-

                               II

     In winter the day began in the bowels of the house at about
five o'clock, when Edward the coachman, who lived with his family
over the stable, entered the cellar to shake down the furnace and
put on fresh coal.  At six Katie crept quietly down from the
third story to start a similar process in the kitchen range.  At
seven we all got up.  Father was the first, and we could hear him
splashing in his daily cold bath in the nickel-plated tub and
snorting as he passed salt water vigorously through his nasal
passages.  We children washed our faces in the china bowls in our
rooms, because baths for children occurred at bedtime.  Our
patient and comfortable Maggie still superintended my dressing,
which required a major effort since my costume in winter
consisted of a long-sleeved undershirt, long-legged drawers that
buttoned unto a cotton "waist", white cotton drawers with Hamburg
edging, a flannel petticoat, a white petticoat with a ruffle,
long black cotton stockings, high buttoned shoes and a full
skirted cotton dress buttoned up the back.

     At half-past seven we had breakfast, beginning with large
bowls of oatmeal or hominy, progressing through a middle course
of egg and bacon, creamed cod-fish or hash on toast to a dish of
prunes or an orange at the end.  From the dining-room the whole
family moved to the library for family prayers.  Father read a
bible passage, the we all got up, turned around, and knelt before
our chairs while we joined in reciting the General Thanksgiving
from the Episcopal Prayer Book, to which father added a collect
or two, and ended with the Lord's Prayer.  Then we dispersed in
different directions.  Father was the first to go, impeccably
dressed in his well-brushed Derby hat and velvet collared town
coat, to take the train to New York.  To the station every
morning went all the father in the neighborhood, to catch the
8:08 or the 8:28 according as the importance of their respective
positions required a prompt arrival at the office or allowed a
leisurely schedule.  In the evening they all returned on the same
plan, those with the more important positions arriving first.

     We children, mean while, went to the back hall where our
coats and caps, leggings, mittens, and arctics were kept, and out
through the kitchen door to school.  Kathrina and I hadn't far to
go, for Mrs. Door's school was on the street than ran beside the
house.  It was a small private school of high standards, but boys
were not accepted after the first few grades, and Garrat had to
go elsewhere.  When he was about twelve he was entered at the
Newark Academy, a large institution with years of good reputation
behind it, and was gone all day, so that he became a stranger
with interest in the great world beyond our knowledge.

     With all of us out of the way Mother began her house keeping
operations. She was not an enthusiastic house keeper, like some
mothers, I saw else where, who fused about every small household
operation, looked into every dish in the ice-box, and lifted the
corners of rugs after cleaning.  Though she couldn't cook at all,
she knew how to get the results she wanted from those who did the
work.  She gave them her trust and her sympathy, and they gave
her good service and affectionate loyalty, even if they sometimes
cut corners.

                               -6-

      First Mother talked with Katie about the day's menus and
made a list of the food to be bought.  Edward came up to find out
when his services would be needed.  Mr. Bradbury, the grocer's
man, stopped with his horse and buggy at the back gate and came
in to take the orders that would be delivered later in the day,
meanwhile carrying on friendly banter with Katie.  Then Mother
went upstairs to water the miscellaneous plants she cherished in
a little room with a glass wall between the two big front
windows.  They were arranged on a sort of grandstand facing the
sun, but I cannot remember any flowers at all except an
occasional exotic looking red blossom springing from the side of
a cactus leaf.  Downstairs again, Mother usually spent some time
at her desk in the library, paying bills, writing social notes,
and answering the voluminous letters she received from her
sister, our Aunt Annie, who lived in Albany.  Meanwhile Maggie
was busy upstairs making beds, dusting, polishing the bathtub,
and on special cleaning days sweeping the carpets with a broom
after sprinkling them with damp tea leaves saved from the kitchen
teapot, while the waitress, whose name changed from time to time,
carried on similar operations downstairs.

     Until mail deliveries where introduced Mother often drove
with Edward to the post office, a mile away, stopping at the
market near it to pick out her meat and vegetables.  The coup‚ in
which she drove in winter and the open phaeton, her favorite
vehicle for warmer weather, were never used, like the modern
family car, for transporting freight, but the packages were
delivered at the kitchen door by the butcher's man or the shiny
delivery wagon from the grocery.

     At one o'clock we girls came home to lunch and then were
free for the afternoon, except for music lessons and daily
practicing.  There was a huge play-room on the top floor,
furnished chiefly with a see-saw large enough for grown people,
which provided fine thumps and bouncings when outdoor exercise
was impossible.  A three story doll house, inherited from our
grandmother Van Wagenen, with her maiden name "Bleecker" on the
door plate, stood against the wall.  It had been refurnished in
Victorian style for Kathrina when she was a baby, but the kitchen
remained true to the period in which it was built, with paneled
cupboards and a brick fireplace.  Many plays in costume and
continued games of adventure were carried on in the play room and
the more mysterious attic behind it, but whenever we could we
played outdoors.

     Garrat, always gay and adventurous, had many resources in
the neighborhood, from a nearby frog pond to a tree house in the
top of a tall pine inaccessible to girls, but he also joined in
the collective activities that centered around the tool house, a
small square building that had once been the railroad station and
had been moved to our back yard.  It was an excellent place for
club
                               -7-

meetings, and it even served as a prison in local wars.  Among
the gang of children who frequented it was Lizzie Hitch, who wore
her hair like Alice in Wonderland, and to whom Garrat, even then,
showed a special partiality.  Perhaps the dearest of all play
places was the cherry tree by the back gate, which served as a
ship, a house, or a "jungle gym" and had, besides, a personality
of its own.  Without benefit of blue jeans, or even bloomers, we
girls managed quite successfully to climb trees, vault fences and
take daring leaps from high positions.  Kathrina and her best
friend carried on an endless adolescent conversations in their
favorite tree seats, and when I was the first to come down with
the measles and she was not wanted either at school or in the
house, she took refuge in the comforting arms of the cherry tree
while her fate was being settled.

     For Mother and the women of her acquaintance most of the
afternoons were dedicated to social life, which, as seen by a
child, consisted in making and receiving "calls".  Formally
dressed in a well-fitting street costume of broadcloth, with hat
and veil and white kid gloves, Mother would drive about the town
to make brief visits at the houses of half a dozen ladies who had
called on her or invited her to a tea or luncheon.  Fifteen or
twenty minutes was enough at each house, and if by good luck she
found the hostess out, leaving a card on the silver salver
presented by the maid gave her equal credit and allowed her more
time at home with her children, her books, and her embroidery and
basket making.  In the winter we were all in the house by five
o'clock, and when the sun was down the waitress lighted a wax
taper that ran through a tube long enough to reach the
chandeliers, and made the circuit of all the rooms, upstairs and
down, to light the gas.  The flames were turned low except in the
halls and the library, where the family would soon gather.  There
three shaded oil lamps for reading were also lighted, and the
room was ready for the moment when Father's latchkey would be
heard in the door and the evening officially opened.  Before he
sat down to relax, Father went up to wash his hands and comb his
hair and beard, take out a clean handkerchief and put a drop of
cologne on it before tucking it into his breast pocket, so that
he came down smelling pungently fresh.

     Until I was nine or ten I uncomplainingly ate supper alone
at a round table in the corner of the dining-room, and I suppose
the older children, meanwhile, were enjoying, during the hour
before dinner, what a little later became the high point of the
day for me, when Mother read aloud.  Kim and the Jungle Books,
Treasure Island, and David Balfour, but especially Dickens,
beginning with David Copperfield, are all associated in my mind
with Mother, sitting at one end of the sofa under a tall lamp
while I, rolled into a ball at the other end, absorbed into every
fiber new experiences of times past and made friends with the
miscellaneous characters in far places.

     Somewhere in the schedule "homework", the inevitable
accompaniment of school days, must have fitted in, but the
remembered picture of our evenings contains an open fire, and
Father quietly dominating the scene as he sat in the big chair
smoking his one cigar of the day, relaxed and meditative but
ready to respond to our interests.  He seldom talked of his own,
though we
                               -8-

knew how much he cared about helping to make the world a better
place, and problems of poverty, ignorance and degeneracy were in
the atmosphere around us.  Mr. MacDougall, the director of the
Bureau of Associated Charities, who is chiefly memorable to me as
the first person I knew who was wall-eyed, was a frequent
visitor, since Father was president of the board of the
institution and was eager to lead it into modern scientific
methods of work.  Sometimes Father told us of events at the
publishing office of Dodd Mead and Company, of which he was the
treasurer, and occasionally he brought home a visiting author or
told us anecdotes of those he met.  The best of the new books
were always on our table, as well as the leading literary
periodical of the time The Bookman, which the company published,
and The Atlantic and Harper's as well.

     Father's chief recreation was riding and driving, though
when he found time for his solitary rides on his favorite horse,
Major, I cannot imagine.  Sunday mornings before church he
inspected the stable, always kept in apple pie order by Edward,
who must have been trained as a groom on an English estate.  The
straw bedding in the stalls never grew stale, the horses were
combed and curried every day and their hooves were varnished with
something that smelled delicious.  The harness was well oiled and
the silver mountings were kept polished.  The carriages, drawn up
in a row opposite the stalls, were carefully washed when they
were put away and dusted before each use.  Beneath them the floor
was covered with white sand, decorated for the Sunday inspection
with a stenciled border in sands of different color.

     Sunday morning the "big carriage", a sort of barouche, was
rolled out, and the whole family, including Katie, drove to the
Presbyterian Church.  Father wore a tall silk hat, which seemed
to emphasize his large nose, and the rest of us had special
Sunday clothes in which we felt dignified and perhaps even
sanctified, with just a touch of pride to keep us human.  We did
not go to Sunday School because our parents thought the teaching
so inadequate that we might receive distorted impressions of the
Bible and its meaning.  Instead, they read us the Bible stories
themselves on Sunday evenings from a profusely illustrated book
still in my possession, in which the engraved figures, almost
sculpturally heroic in quality, have always remained in my memory
as authentic portraits of the characters.

     Every pleasant Sunday afternoon we piled into an open
carriage, or in winter a big sleigh filled with fur robes, and
headed for the country with Father driving.  "Over the mountain",
though the mountain was only a low ridge, meant the enchantment
of new scenes, and I, who was full of every sort of fear under
new circumstances, was the one who begged persistently for more
and more, while Kathrina, who only a few years later volunteered
as a foreign missionary, was fretful about unknown turnings, lest
we get lost in the wilderness.  Of Garrat, on these expeditions,
I remember little except his tendency, common to all brothers, to
tease his sisters when crowded in three abreast on the back seat.

                               -9-

                               III.

     I never heard of either of our parents raise their voices in
anger, but Father could be severe in what he said and in
assigning punishments.  Privately, I am sure, he agonized over
our faults.  The elder two remembered spankings, and were
slightly bitter because their little sister never received any,
but their sins of quick temper and disobedience were positive,
and could be treated positively, while hers were chiefly sins of
omission.  How could you be spanked for something you had not
done?  We all had the utmost confidence in Father's judgment and
faith in his love, which, though undemonstrative, could be felt
in his voice and the quality of his smile.  A drive or a holiday
expedition with him alone was an experience to be highly prized.

     Although Mother also was reserved, she was an ally and a
companion, who entered imaginately into our games and was aware
of every mood.  Her quick sense of humor saved many a situation.
I was with her more than the others because I was the youngest,
and it would have been unthinkable not to wish to please her.  A
word of reproof from her caused me miseries of remorse.  She
treated everybody down to the cat with courtesy, and respected
their rights as individuals.  She had her own way of treating
problems, and I remember one instance for which I have been
grateful all my life.  When I was about six I became for a time a
person named Rose Green.  Since Rose was a visitor in the house,
it became difficult to enforce the rules and Mother, quite
understandably, felt it was necessary to send her away.  One day
Mother told me that she missed Theodora so much that she was
afraid Rose would have to go home.  She said she would take her
in the carriage, so Edward hitched up the horses and we spent the
afternoon driving around until we found a suitable house for the
visitor to live in.  Rose said goodbye, and when we returned home
Theodora was welcomed as warmly as the prodigal son.

     Mother's close friend was her sister-in-law, our charming
Aunt Agnes, the wife of Fathers only brother, Fred.  When the
telephone was put in they talked with each other daily, and we
children teased Mother unmercifully about their constant
communication, but at the time of this picture there was still no
telephone.  Her other personal outlet was the Current Events
Club, a group of women who met once a week to read and discuss
the issues of the day.  These lively and informal meetings
compensated for the stiffer social duties of making calls and
giving an occasional formal dinner.  Every autumn Father and
Mother went off on a sort of honeymoon trip, driving through the
country in their own carriage, putting up at night in little
village inns and sometimes letting the horses choose the road.
The total distance they traveled would probably be covered by a
modern car in less than half a day, but the adventures they
encountered would hardly be met today on a trans-continental
tour.

     Mother was a pure New Englander, born in Springfield
Massachusetts, but she and Father met each other in New York,
where his family had lived for generations.  Father was of almost
straight Dutch descent.  The Van Wagenens, who settled in the
highlands of the Hudson River in

                              -10-

the 1650's came from a town in Holland named Wageningen, and the
title "van Wageningen" was given to them after they came, to
distinguish them from others with the same surname.  Fathers
Mother's family, the Bleeckers, for whom Bleecker street in New
York was named, were among the early settlers of Albany, where
members of the first two generations held the office of mayor.
Our branches of the Bleecker and Van Wagenen families moved to
New York City early in the 18th century, where they intermarried
with other Dutch families.  They had many children, and Father
was provided with immense numbers of aunts and uncles, though
through early deaths and failure to marry the next generations
were not so numerous.  His father, William Frederick Van Wagenen,
owned a substantial wholesale business of some sort.  With a
patriarchal sense of duty he took in the widowed and unmarried
aunts, and the two little boys, Frederick William and Bleecker,
found themselves governed by a self-constituted committee of fond
but rigid minded women.  Fred conformed, and amiably adapted
himself to the family pattern, but Bleecker, though sensitive and
fearful as a child, felt the need of independence and started
early to earn his own living.  A college education was not then
considered a necessary preparation for a business career and to
work one's way up from the bottom was in the American tradition.
Father started as a delivery boy for a wholesale drug firm.
Having been dispatched on one of his early expedition with an
order to hurry, he ran around a corner and collided with an old
lady in a hoop skirt, tripped her up, and fell with her, his foot
through the hoops, in a confused mass, breaking the large bottle
of quinine pills he was carrying.  It tool courage to report the
accident, but he did so and accepted the punishment of having the
cost of the pills deducted from his slender wages week by week
until they were paid for.  We never heard what happened to the
old lady and her hoops.

     When the patriarchal establishment moved out to Roseville,
then a pleasant suburb of Newark, where a huge house, built for a
girls' school, offered space enough for the whole assembly,
Bleecker at seventeen stayed behind in a New York boarding house
as an independent man.  When he met Kate Holland fifteen years or
so later he was already with Dodd Mead and Company, a quiet, self-
educated man, who spent most of his evenings reading and took his
vacations on horse-back in the wilds.  He was one of the early
visitors to the Yosemite Valley when it took days of rough going
to accomplish the trip.

     Kate had come to New York with her family when her father,
Josiah Gilbert Holland, started the magazine, Scribner's Monthly,
and became its editor.  He was already known for his poems,
essays and novels, as well as his work as associate editor of a
widely read newspaper, the Springfield Republican.  The Hollands
had spent two years in Europe, where the girls had gone to school
in Germany and France.  When they came to New York Annie and Kate
had an opportunity to meet most of the literary people who
gathered there, and quickly became part of a group of young
people who met for skating parties, Shakespeare readings or
sedate Sunday suppers.  Most of the young men were college
graduates entering the professions, and Bleecker Van Wagenen, who
was a little older, was never a part of that particular circle.
From the time
                              -11-

when a friend brought him to a party, his interest centered in
Kate Holland, whose heart was finally won by his quality of
steady dedication to the best he knew and the quiet persistence
of his devotion to her.  So their life together began and the
house and family at Lawnhurst came into being.

                              -12-

                               IV

     It may be noticed that I recall winter more often than
summer, as I look back on the life at Lawnhurst.  The reason is
that soon after school was out, the middle of June, we left the
mosquitoes of New Jersey-and with them the beautiful
fireflies-and spent the whole vacation at Bonnie Castle, the
house Grandfather Holland had built for a summer home on the
shore of the Saint Lawrence River at Alexandria Bay in the
Thousand Island region.  With the South Orange house closed
Father engaged a room at his club in New York and made us shorts
visits until August, when he took his own vacation.  It was
exciting to go to bed in a sleeping car, to wake in the night and
peep out at the shadowy vanishing countryside, and to arrive in
the morning at Clayton, where a paddle wheel steamer waited to
take us down the river.  Before Grandmother died, when I was
five, she was hostess and housekeeper for the congregated family,
and sometimes there were fifteen people in the house aside from
the servants.  The place with its long riverfront and its
meandering creek at the back, that almost cut it off from the
mainland, was a paradise for children.  There were massive
granite ledges, pine woods and birch trees, a pebbly beach to
play on at Kathrina's Bay, where we swam, and the light and
graceful Saint Lawrence skiffs to row.  There was a vegetable
garden cultivated by the year-round caretaker, who lived in a
cottage on the landward side, and a sheltered lawn with a turf
tennis court and croquet ground.  The traffic passing on the
river was an endless source of interest, and we could identify
the passenger steamers and yachts as far off as they could be
seen.  If we stood on a high cliff directly above the main
channel and waved vigorously enough, we could occasionally elicit
a salute of three blasts of the whistle from one of the big
liners, when the captain was in a jovial mood.  That was a
triumph that crowned a happy day.

     Once every summer we took a trip through the islands on an
excursion boat, and sometimes there were fishing parties in
skiffs, including a picnic lunch on some inhabited shore, where
the fish we had caught were fried over a fire of dried sticks.
It was at Bonnie Castle that Garrat first fell under the spell of
boats that held him all his life, and it was there he started
drawing designs for the yachts he would sometime build.

     One summer, about the time of which I am writing, Garrat
became ill with a mild case of scarlet fever, in which those days
was quarantined for six weeks.  He was established in the best
bedroom upstairs, with a trained nurse for the first week or two,
and Mother devoted herself to entertaining him.  Kathrina, our
cousin Alison Howe and I, with Maggie, moved downstairs and lived
in the parlor, where four cots were set up in a row and all our
possessions were stowed away in boxes or under the piano.  When
Garrat was well enough to go out, but was still untouchable, a
ladder was set up to his window so that he could wander in one
direction while the rest of us carefully took another.  There was
a strange sense of adventure about that summer when the world was
seen from a different angle, such as one feels when one lies in
bed and contemplates walking on the ceiling.

     During those years we needed no companions except ourselves.
Alison, with her parents, was always with us, and it was her
father, Uncle John, who taught us to row, to play tennis and to

                              -13-

swim.  Mothers younger brother, Uncle Ted Holland, lived too far
away to come often, but at least two summers he brought Aunt
Florence and the twins, Barbara and Elizabeth, from Denver for a
long visit.  When the older children began to grow up it seemed
best to give them a chance to meet more young people, and our
beloved Bonnie Castle was sold.  Soon after that Kathrina and
Garrat went to visit Elizabeth Hitch at Alstead Center, New
Hampshire, and a new chapter began that has never ended.  The Van
Wagenen family built a summer home of their own at Alstead and
called it Windy Browe, and a few years later Garrat and Elizabeth
were married.

     When we came back home to school in the fall there was
chestnut time to look forward to.  Red leaves and yellow leaves
turned brown and made thick carpets to rustle through, were raked
up and burned in the gutters and on the denuded garden beds, and
turned into beautiful pungent blue smoke.  Then the prickly
chestnut burrs opened and fell along our driveway and we picked
up the plump chestnuts, inspecting each one carefully for
wormholes, because to bite into a chestnut worm was the utmost
horror.  Sometimes we roasted them in the burning leaves,
sometimes over the library fire, or even stuck one at a time on a
long hat pin and held it over the lamp on the center table until
it cracked.  After that came Thanksgiving, sometimes at Uncle
Fred's in East Orange and sometimes at our house.  It was just
like everyone's Thanksgiving, with Turkey and minced pie and too
much of everything for comfort.

     And so we come to the end of the year and Christmas, when
the house was full of people, some dear, some strange, though all
were our relations.  Lets join a typical Christmas party and see
who these people were.

     Aunt Annie, Uncle John and Alison Howe came down from Albany
and were staying in the house.  On Christmas Eve we all helped
trim the tree, putting on dozens of candles of all colors.
Alison's stocking was hung with our three from the mantelpiece in
the room Kathrina and I shared, and in the half-dark of Christmas
morning we all gathered on our beds to open them.  Even before
breakfast the barley sugar animals had begun to disappear.  In
mid-morning the Van Wagenens from East Orange arrived to open
their presents with us.  There was Uncle Fred, with gold rimmed
spectacles and more head on his head and in his beard than Father
had, genial and kind to everyone, but exact in all his habits and
asking the same of others.  Aunt Agnes, who had spent the whole
of her married life in the house with her husband's aunts, was
nevertheless gay and gracious, with just a touch of southern
manner left and a childlike capacity for enjoyment.  Their
children, Mary Lacy, called Lacy without the Mary, and Noel, were
younger than Kathrina and Garrat but older than I, so we did not
know them very well as children and felt a little shy with them.
With this family came the two remaining Van Wagenen great aunts,
who lived with them now that the Roseville household was broken
up.  Aunt Liz, who was born in 1809 and had met Lafayette when he
returned to America for a visit, was small and very wrinkled and
slightly acid.  She had an appropriate quotation for every
occasion taken from the Bible, a hymn or a poem of the dreary
sort, or even a household maxim.  Sweet faced Aunt Anna, twelve
years younger, with a twist in her back, had a warmer more
personal approach.  Both wore stiff black silk and frilly caps
with lavender ribbons.

                              -14-

     When everyone was settled the tree was lighted and a pail of
water was set close to it with a sponge on the end of a stick in
case something should catch fire.  Heaps of presents lay around
the tree, each arrival adding something more, and while they were
being distributed and the clothes basket for papers was beginning
to fill up the Dennys arrived on a train from New York.  Cousin
Lucy, whose mother was a Bleecker, and her husband Thomas Denny
were a rich and childless couple whose money came from a Wall
Street banking firm.  They were both tall and handsome, and
Cousin Thomas, who was much older than his wife, looked very
distinguished with his white hair and side whiskers.  To be
kissed by him was a disturbing experience.  Their Christmas
presents were of a different order from the rest, of silver,
satin, and tortoise shell, and invitations from them included
rich food and opera tickets.  But Cousin Lucy was a simple,
amiable person, and one of the mainstays of the Women's Board of
Foreign Missions of the Presbyterian Church.  With them came dear
Cousin Addie, no relation to us, but a member of the Denny
household as Cousin Tom's unmarried sister.  She wore very thick
glasses, but in spite of her poor sight she was very perceptive
and sympathetic with the young.

     Father's cousins did not all come every Christmas, but
looking back to successive Christmases I see a sort of composite
picture containing all their faces.  Sometimes there was another
childless couple, Harry Van Wagenen and his tiny wife Emily from
Morristown.  Then there was a whole range of old maids.  There
were so many unmarried women among the Van Wagenens that Mother
is reported to have remarked when I was born and she was told it
was a girl, "Another Van Wagenen old maid!".  There were two
sisters, Mary and Blanche, whose conversations were concerned
chiefly with the doings of people of whom we had never heard.
There was cousin Anna Breath, whose strange name seemed
inappropriately light for so tall and gaunt a woman.  She
supported herself by teaching private pupils, and really cared
about the contents of the books she gave them to study so that
they came back to thank her in later years.  The most frequent
visitor among the old maids, however, was Cousin Carrie Van
Wagenen, accompanied in those years by her niece Hazel whom she
had brought up.  She told me once that she had never had time to
get married because there was always some child for whom she had
to be responsible.  First it was her younger sister Jessie then
her brother's orphaned Hazel, then one or another of Jessie's
children, and in her old age it was Hazel's son.  She was not
well off, but she looked like a duchess in other people's made
over clothes, and she never leaned back in her chair until the
end of her life at ninety-four.

     The Holland side was slimly represented at these gatherings
because Mother's relations did not live within easy reach.  We
never saw Uncle Ted and his family except in summer and the
cousins lived in Massachusetts, Ohio, Texas, and even in England,
but Mother and Aunt Annie managed to hold their own in the
overwhelming majority of Van Wagenens, and it is possible that
the dinner, at least, had a New England flavor.  After dinner
Kathrina and I had to

                              -15-

 show our progress in piano playing by performing for the
assembled company and more, I think, as a part of our training
than for the delectation of the audience, and then the afternoon
began to be wearisome.  As I recall these parties, even though
not all those I have named were present at once, I wonder how the
few children in such an assemblage of grown ups found anything to
rejoice over.  In actual experience it never occurred to me to
feel that we were unfairly treated in being asked to take part as
responsible members of the company from beginning to end of the
celebration.  My own most cherished memories of Christmas,
however, are of it's earliest hours, of waking in the dark to
remember that the Christ Child had been born in the cold night is
a stable, and with the first ray of light catching an excited
glimpse of the bumpy stockings hanging from the mantelpiece.  By
the time the guests began to leave in the afternoon, the
accumulated effect of early rising, the tree, the presents, the
dinner and the crowd of elders had reduced me to such a state
that I was usually sent to bed early with a slight fever.  Thus,
as a reporter, I am able to carry the story no further, and the
account of Christmas at Lawnhurst comes to an abrupt end, but the
daily life of the family goes on and on through the years, with
countless changes and shiftings of scene until you, too, come
into the picture.  And so I bring to an end this little offering
to later generations.

                              -16-

                          A FEW VERSES


                        REMEMBERED TREES


                                I

                         Slim and straight
                         And very neat,
                         An ash tree stood
                         Beside the gate.
                         Impersonal to you or me -
                         A very professional
                         Sort of tree -
                         Like a well trained servitor,
                         It had the air
                         Of being there
                         To usher in the visitor
                         Who might come down the street.


                               II

                         The rangy giant sycamore,
                         Lifting his piebald body from the bed
                         Of smooth-clipped lawn that spread
                         Before the door -
                         A lusty tramp among the parlor-bred -
                         Held his head
                         So high
                         His topmost branches certainly
                         Were invisible to the naked eye.


                               III

                         The old, old willow
                         Leaned heavily over the bank.
                         Part of him wasn't there any more,
                         But his inner self was sound to the core,
                         It held him up and gave him rank -
                         Of all the trees he was counselor.
                         And besides
                         He let his sloping trunk be used
                         For breathless leaps or giddy slides,
                         And never felt abused.

                               IV

                         A gracious lady pine tree, dressed
                         In tufted green the whole year through,
                         Took kindly thought for fairies, lest
                         They wander homeless in the dew.
                         Around her base the roots left spaces
                         That made the nicest sleeping places,
                         Furnished with couches formed of mosses
                         And carpeted with shreds of grasses.
                         It gratified her sentiments
                         To hear her guests' acknowledgments
                         And notice how they crowded in
                         When winds grew sharp and gauze seemed
                         thin.

                                V

                         What other tree could be as merry
                         As the cherry?
                         The childrens' closest friend,
                         Playmate and protector
                         And general benefactor,
                         Source of pleasure without ends:
                         Beauty to look at when the white dome
                         Of blossom told that spring as here,
                         Fruit to nibble at with glee - and fear
                         Of lurking worm -
                         And ever such staunch in sun or storm
                         To offer shelter like a home
                         In heavenly mansions safe above the
                         ground,
                         When it seemed happier to not be found.