THERE had been a heavy rain the night before, and I was playing with sand and water in the deep trench between the road and the lower wall of my father's garden, and enjoying it as much as a boy of eight years can enjoy anything without the company of other boys. A swift stream of clear water rushed down this sandy gutter, and made for me a far-western river, on whose bank I was constructing a fort to defy the hostile Indians. I had selected a grassy promontory, jutting out into the stream, and had pulled all the grass out by the roots and levelled the earth, and was beginning on my fortifications, when I observed with alarm the dissolution of the point of my site, which, no longer held together by the fibrous grass roots, was rapidly turning into black mud and going down the current in a cloud.

I tried to stem the flood with a flat stone set on end; but it would not stay on end, and I was contemplating the necessity of a change of base for my military operations, when the end of a thick walking-stick was thrust between my face and the water, and I heard a tremulous, eager old voice cry earnestly:

"Farther up— farther up, my lad—there—there where you have it now—set off the current ever so little—ay, that's it! Now build your sea-wall—good boy!"

I obeyed him mechanically, and in a few seconds saw the stream swirl off from my point, leaving it in a safe space of calm water. The Indians on the other shore must have felt gloomy forebodings.

I looked up. A tall, gaunt old gentleman, with a Roman nose and a delicate mouth, with deep wrinkles about it, as though he drew his lips together a good deal, stood and looked hard at the water. He did not look at me at all; but I looked hard at him—at his sad old face, his shabby brown broadcloth coat, the great rusty black satin stock about his neck, and his napless beaver hat with its rolling brim.

He stared at the water for a moment or two, gave an odd sort of half-choked sigh, and passed on his way.

That was the first time Squire Five-Fathom spoke to me.

The town where I lived and fought Indians was called Gerrit's Gate. (For the benefit of a generation that pronounces Coney Island and Hoboken as they are spelled, that knows not oelykoeks, and that desecrates suppawn by calling it mush, let me say that Gerrit to the eye is Gerrit to the ear.) The story of Gerrit's Gate is the story of Myndert Gerrit and his son, the old gentleman who helped me in my civil-engineering.

Myndert Gerrit came from Schenectady to found the place. He was a rich man by inheritance, and he had moreover inherited pride, ambition, and a high temper—a mental and spiritual outfit which put him sadly out of place in a conservative old midland town. I do not know just what was his quarrel with Schenectady; but I know he bought his square mile of "military lots" on the shore of Lake Ontario with the avowed intention of building up a town that should be to Schenectady as a mountain to a hill—and that should incidentally outrival Rochester and Oswego. He said, and indeed it seemed, that the finger of heaven had pointed out the place.

As he stood on the hill to the south-west of his new purchase, Myndert Gerrit saw before him three wooded promontories stretching out into the lake—Near Point to the east, Far Point to the west, and Middle Point, shorter by half than its neighbors, nestling between them, and dividing a large bay into two snug harbors. Middle Point must have been, centuries ago, as long as the others, but it had been fighting a slowly losing battle with the mighty current from the west that swept inward from Far and out again past the end of Near Point. This current made entrance to the western harbor difficult—even dangerous—but the eastern it was an easier matter to reach, and, once in, the largest ship on the lake could lie in safe water while the northwester went by Far and Near and the current hammered away at Middle, making a poor foot a year out of the firm, root-bound soil. And at the head of this little haven the land lay in a low plateau, forming a natural levee.

Here came Myndert Gerrit, in 1822, with his only son (he was a widower) and his whole household, including ten free negroes, formerly his slaves. The son was then a man of thirty, unmarried and devoted in all things to his father. They were constant companions, and as far as I could learn, they cared little for other society. Gerrit reserved the high eastern promontory for his own mansion. He laid the foundation that year, while he and his people lived in log-cabins. During the summer he surveyed the level land, and staked it out for streets. In the fall he went to New York, and he returned the next spring, leading a caravan of some twenty families, and bringing with him the machinery for a saw-mill and a grist-mill. It was a long and tiresome journey: a great labor of transportation; but, by water and by wagon, they made it in about a month.