plunging the horses, sleigh and party in the rapid stream.  With great presence of mind, the mother threw her infant, an only son, upon a floating frozen cake, which, like the ark of Moses, floated him safely down the stream, until he was providentially rescued.  For some time this child was the only male Dubois among the Paltz Huguenots, and had he perished on that perilous occasion, his family name would also have perished with him; still there were seven females of the same house, called the seven zuisters, all of whom married among the most respectable French Protestant families.  To no stock do more families in Ulster County trace their origin than that of Dubois.  Some antiquarians deny this tradition of the seven sisters, but contend that they were Lefevres.

There were two Le Fevres among the Ulster patentees.  Their progenitors it is said were among those early Protestants of France who distinguished themselves for intellectual powers, prominence in the Reformed Church, with enduring patience under the severest trials, and death itself.  Le Fevre, a doctor of theology, adorned the French metropolis when Paris caught the first means of salvation in the fifteenth century.  He preached the pure gospel within its walls; and this early teacher declared ’our religion has only one foundation, one object, one head, Jesus Christ, blessed forever.  Let us then not take the name of Paul, of Apostles, or of Peter.  The Cross of Christ alone opens heaven and shuts the gates of hell.’  In 1524, he published a translation of the New Testament, and the next year a version of the Psalms.  Many received the Holy Scriptures from his hands, and read them in their families, producing the happiest results.  Margaret, the beautiful and talented Princess of Valois, celebrated by all the wits and scholars of the time, embraced the true Christianity, uniting her fortune and influence with the Huguenots, and the Reformation thus had a witness in the king’s court.  She was sister to Francis the First, the reigning monarch.  By the hands of this noble lady, the Bishop of Meuse sent to the king a translation of St. Paul’s Epistles, richly illuminated, he adding, in his quaint and beautiful language, ’They will make a truly royal dish of fatness, that never corrupts, and having the power to restore from all manner of sickness.  The more we taste them, the more we hunger after them, with desires that are ever fed and never cloyed.’

Abraham Hasbroucq, which is the original orthography of the name among the patentees, was a native of Calais, and the first emigrant of that family to America, in 1675, with a party of Huguenot friends; they resided for a while in the Palatinate on the banks of the Rhine.  To commemorate their kindness, when they reached our shores the new settlement was called ‘De Paltz,’ now ‘New Paltz,’ as the Palatinate was always styled by the Dutch.  Here, also, the beautiful stream flowing through New Paltz was known by the name of Walkill, after the river Wael, a branch of the Rhine, running into Holland.