ey went out into the world, the girls and boys of that island
home, each carrying the story of their father's simple but beautiful
work and the remembrance of their mother's message. Not one from that
home but did well his or her work in the world; some greater, some
smaller, but each left behind the traces of a life well spent.

And, as all good work is immortal, so to-day all over the world goes on
the influence of this one 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."

EDWARD W. BOK

MERION

PENNSYLVANIA

A DUTCH BOY FIFTY YEARS AFTER

CHAPTER 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-