AS I KNEW HIM
1832-1845
Our family Bible, in the record just between the Old
and the New Testaments, has this entry: “Thomas
DeWitt, Born January 7, 1832.” I was the
youngest of a family of twelve children, all of whom
lived to grow up except the first, and she was an
invalid child.
I was the child of old age. My nativity, I am
told, was not heartily welcomed, for the family was
already within one of a dozen, and the means of support
were not superabundant. I arrived at Middlebrook,
New Jersey, while my father kept the toll-gate, at
which business the older children helped him, but
I was too small to be of service. I have no memory
of residence there, except the day of departure, and
that only emphasised by the fact that we left an old
cat which had purred her way into my affections, and
separation from her was my first sorrow, so far as
I can remember.
In that home at Middlebrook, and in the few years
after, I went through the entire curriculum of infantile
ailments. The first of these was scarlet fever,
which so nearly consummated its fell work on me that
I was given up by the doctors as doomed to die, and,
according to custom in those times in such a case,
my grave clothes were completed, the neighbours gathering
for that purpose. During those early years I took
such a large share of epidemics that I have never been
sick since with anything worthy of being called illness.
I never knew or heard of anyone who has had such remarkable
and unvarying health as I have had, and I mention
it with gratitude to God, in whose “hand our
breath is, and all our ways.”
The “grippe,” as it is called, touched
me at Vienna when on my way from the Holy Land, but
I felt it only half a day, and never again since.
I often wonder what has become of our old cradle in
which all of us children were rocked! We were
a large family, and that old cradle was going a good
many years. I remember just how it looked.
It was old-fashioned and had no tapestry. Its
two sides and canopy were of plain wood, but there
was a great deal of sound sleeping in that cradle,
and many aches and pains were soothed in it. Most
vividly I remember that the rockers, which came out
from under the cradle, were on the top and side very
smooth, so smooth that they actually glistened.
But it went right on and rocked for Phoebe the first,
and for DeWitt the last.
There were no lords or baronets or princes in our
ancestral line. None wore stars, cockade, or
crest. There was once a family coat-of-arms, but
we were none of us wise enough to tell its meaning.
Do our best, we cannot find anything about our forerunners
except that they behaved well, came over from Wales
or Holland a good while ago, and died when their time
came. Some of them may have had fine equipages
and postilions, but the most of them were sure only
of footmen. My father started in life belonging
to the aristocracy of hard knuckles and homespun,
but had this high honour that no one could despise:
he was the son of a father who loved God and kept
His commandments. Two eyes, two hands, and two
feet were the capital my father started with.
