ng. Uncle Charles was a man of strong
Irish features, like Grandfather. He was a farmer who lived in Genesee
County. Uncle Martin was a farmer of fair intelligence; Ezekiel was
lower in the scale than the others; was intemperate, and after losing
his farm became a day-laborer. He would carry a gin-bottle into the
fields, and would mow the stones as readily as he would the grass--and
I had to turn the grindstone to sharpen his scythe. Uncle Edmund was a
farmer and a pettifogger. Uncle William died comparatively young; he
had nurseries near Rochester. Uncle Thomas was a farmer, slow and canny,
with a quiet, dry humor. Aunt Hannah married Robert Avery, who drank a
good deal; I can't remember anything about her. Aunt Abby was large and
thrifty; she married John Jenkins, and had a large family.... Amy, my
mother, was her mother's tenth child.

Mother was born in Rensselaer County near Albany, in 1808. Her father
moved to Delaware County when she was a child, driving there with an
ox-team. Mother "worked out" in her early teens. She was seventeen or
eighteen when she married, February, 1827.

Father and Mother first went to keeping house on Grandfather Burroughs's
old place--not in the log house, but in the frame house of which you saw
the foundations. Brother Hiram was born there.

(Mr. Burroughs's last walk with his father was to the crumbling
foundations of this house. I have heard him tell how his father stood
and pointed out the location of the various rooms--the room where they
slept the first night they went there; the one where the eldest child
was born; that in which his mother died. I stood (one August day
in 1902) with Mr. Burroughs on the still remaining joists of his
grandfather's house--grass-grown, and with the debris of stones and
beams mingling with weeds and bushes. He pointed out to me, as his
father had done for him, the location of the various rooms, and mused
upon the scenes enacted there; he showed where the paths led to the barn
and to the spring, and seemed to take a melancholy interest in picturing
the lives of his parents and grandparents. A sudden burst of gladness
from a song sparrow, and his musings gave way to attentive pleasure, and
the sunlit Present claimed him instead of the shadowy Past. He was soon
rejoicing in the discovery of a junco's nest near the foundations of the
old house.--C.B.)

My father, Chauncey Burroughs, was born December 20, 1803. He received a
fair schooling for th