from her waist. Wall Street was
then the fashionable quarter; the city, still in its embryo stater
extending but a little way above it; it was full of dwelling houses, with
here and there a church, which has long since disappeared. Over that
region of the metropolis where Mammon is worshipped in six days out of
seven, there now broods on Sunday a sepulchral silence, but then the walks
were thronged with churchgoers. The boy was his grandmother's constant
companion. He was trained by her to love books and study, to which,
however, he seems to have had a natural and inherited inclination. It is
said that at a very tender age she taught him to declaim passages from
Latin authors, standing on a table, and rewarded him with hot pound-cake.
Another story is, that she used to put sugar-plums near his bedside, to be
at hand in case he should take a fancy to them in the night. But, as he
was not spoiled by indulgence, it is but fair to conclude that her gentle
method of educating him was tempered by firmness on proper occasions--a
quality somewhat rare in grandmothers. A letter from one of her
descendants playfully says:

"It is a picture to think of her, seated at a marvellous Dutch bureau, now
in possession of her great-grand-daughters, which is filled with a
complexity of small and mysterious drawers, talking to the child, while
her servant built the powdered tower on her head, or hung the diamond
rings in her ears. Very likely, at such times, the child was thrusting his
little fingers into the rouge pot, or making havoc with the powder, and
perhaps she knew no better way to bring him to order than to tell him of
many of a fright of her own in the war, or she may have gone further back
in history, and told the boy how her and his Huguenot ancestors fled from
France when the bad King Louis forbade every form of worship but his own."

Dr. Johnson, the grandfather of young Verplanck, on the mother's side,
came from Stratford to be President of Columbia College, the year after
his grandson was born. To him, in an equal degree with his grandmother, we
must give the credit of bringing forward the precocious boy in his early
studies. I have diligently inquired what school he attended and who were
his teachers, but can hear of no other. His father had married again, and
to the lively Huguenot lady was left the almost entire charge of the boy.
He was a born scholar; he took to books as other boys take to marbles; and
the lessons which