ne man and one woman, whose life on that little
Dutch island changed its barren rocks to a bower of verdure, a home for
the birds and the song of the nightingale. The grandchildren have gone
to the four corners of the globe, and are now the generation of
workers--some in the far East Indies; others in Africa; still others in
our own land of America. But each has tried, according to the talents
given, to carry out the message of that day, to tell the story of the
grandfather's work; just as it is told here by the author of this book,
who, in the efforts of his later years, has tried to carry out, so far
as opportunity has come to him, the message of his grandmother:

"Make you the world a bit more beautiful and better because you have
been in it."

The Americanization of Edward Bok

I. The First Days in America

The Leviathan of the Atlantic Ocean, in 1870, was The Queen, and when
she was warped into her dock on September 20 of that year, she
discharged, among her passengers, a family of four from the Netherlands
who were to make an experiment of Americanization.

The father, a man bearing one of the most respected names in the
Netherlands, had acquired wealth and position for himself; unwise
investments, however, had swept away his fortune, and in preference to a
new start in his own land, he had decided to make the new beginning in
the United States, where a favorite brother-in-law had gone several
years before. But that, never a simple matter for a man who has reached
forty-two, is particularly difficult for a foreigner in a strange land.
This fact he and his wife were to find out. The wife, also carefully
reared, had been accustomed to a scale of living which she had now to
abandon. Her Americanization experiment was to compel her, for the first
time in her life, to become a housekeeper without domestic help. There
were two boys: the elder, William, was eight and a half years of age;
the younger, in nineteen days from his landing-date, was to celebrate
his seventh birthday.

This younger boy was Edward William Bok. He had, according to the Dutch
custom, two other names, but he had decided to leave those in the
Netherlands. And the American public was, in later years, to omit for
him the "William."

Edward's first six days in the United States were spent in New York, and
then he was taken to Brooklyn, where he was destined to live for nearly
twenty years.

Thanks to the linguistic sense inheren