y
competent to meet it.

Accustomed to the hardest life, the most rigid economy in the
household, and without servants, for, except rare and lately
emancipated negro slaves, there was then no servile class in that
colony, the children had to perform all the duties pertaining to the
daily life, official or private, and my mother was able to pull an oar
or manage the sail-boat with her brothers, and catch the horses and
ride them bareback from pasture, when necessary for the daily work,
which was not insignificant, for Newport was really the seaport of
that section of the State, and as it was on an island of importance,
the intercourse with the mainland called for sea and land service. The
boys were all fishermen, for a large part of the subsistence of the
family came from the fishing-grounds outside the harbor, and, as the
oldest brother took early to the sailor's life, my mother had to
assume a larger share of all the harder services. The hospital was
also the quarantine station, and received all the cases of smallpox
which came to the port, and they must have been many and fatal, for I
have heard her say that she had to go the rounds of the hospital at
night, and that there would sometimes be five or six dead in the
dead-room at once.

The first acquaintance of my parents with each other was made in the
inoculating class, my father being resident in Westerly, a town of
Rhode Island on the borders of Connecticut. The marriage must have
taken place about two years later, on the second marriage of my
grandfather Maxson to the daughter of Samuel Ward, one of the leading
delegates from Rhode Island to the convention which drew up and
promulgated the Declaration of Independence[1]. Their early days of
married life must have been passed in an extreme frugality, for my
father was one of a large number of children, and, brought up on a
farm, learned the trade of ship-carpenter, which he alternated, as was
generally the habit of the young men of the New England coast, with
fishing on the banks of Newfoundland in the cod-fishing season.
Having, in addition, a share of the Yankee inventiveness, he became
interested in the perfecting of a fulling-machine, to introduce which
into what was then the West, he made a temporary residence in New York
State, at the old Dutch town of Schenectady, at that time the
entrepot of commerce between the Eastern cities and New York, and the
Northwest. Utica was then a frontier settlement, Buffalo