The
two immediate grandmothers were, in the best sense, superior women.
The maternal one (Amy Williams before marriage) was a Friend, or
Quakeress, of sweet, sensible character, house-wifely proclivities,
and deeply intuitive and spiritual. The other (Hannah Brush,) was an
equally noble, perhaps stronger character, lived to be very old,
had quite a family of sons, was a natural lady, was in early life a
school-mistress, and had great solidity of mind. W. W. himself makes
much of the women of his ancestry."--_The Same_.
Out from these arrieres of persons and scenes, I was born May
31, 1819. And now to dwell awhile on the locality itself--as the
successive growth-stages of my infancy, childhood, youth and manhood
were all pass'd on Long Island, which I sometimes feel as if I had
incorporated. I roam'd, as boy and man, and have lived in nearly all
parts, from Brooklyn to Montauk point.
PAUMANOK, AND MY LIFE ON IT AS CHILD AND YOUNG MAN
Worth fully and particularly investigating indeed this Paumanok, (to
give the spot its aboriginal name[3],) stretching east through Kings,
Queens and Suffolk counties, 120 miles altogether--on the north Long
Island sound, a beautiful, varied and picturesque series of inlets,
"necks" and sea-like expansions, for a hundred miles to Orient point.
On the ocean side the great south bay dotted with countless hummocks,
mostly small, some quite large, occasionally long bars of sand out two
hundred rods to a mile-and-a-half from the shore.
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