well-informed. The second, Benjamin, became in after years a
great manufacturer and somewhat noted politician, and owner of a famous
racehorse. The third, Samuel, went into business in Philadelphia, and
crossed the Atlantic with me. He died quite young. All of them, like
their father and grandfather, were very good-natured or gentle, and men
of perfect integrity. The Lelands, however, were rather _dour_ and grim
in their honesty, or more Northern than the Godfreys. This was accounted
for by the fact, that while my father's family was Puritan of the purest,
and only intermarried with Puritan stock, the Godfreys had in Rhode
Island received an infusion of French Huguenot blood, which was indeed
very perceptible in their faces and lively pleasant manner.

There was a strange tradition, to which my mother sometimes jestingly
referred, that there had been among her Rhode Island ancestors a High
German (_i.e._, not a Hollander) doctor, who had a reputation as a
sorcerer or wizard. He was a man of learning, but that is all I ever
heard about him. My mother's opinion was that this was a very strong
case of atavism, and that the mysterious ancestor had through the ages
cropped out again in me. Something tells me that this was the High
German doctor who, according to Washington Irving, laid the mystic spell
on Sleepy Hollow, which made of it such a pleasant, ancient, dreamy fairy-
land. Whether his friendly spirit still watches over me, or whether I am
the man himself, is a problem which I leave to my friend Francis Galton,
who indeed personally often reminds me of Irving. High German sorcerers
were not common in those days north of Pennsylvania, so that I trow mine
was the very man referred to by Geoffrey Crayon. And it is true beyond
all doubt that even in infancy, as I have often heard, there was a quaint
uncanniness, as of something unknown, in my nature, and that I differed
in the main totally from every relative, and indeed from any other little
boy, known to anybody; though I was a perfect Godfrey in face when very
young, as I am now a typical Leland. I was always given to loneliness in
gardens and woods when I could get into them, and to hearing words in
birds' songs and running or falling water; and I once appalled a visitor
by professing seriously that I could determine for him some question as
to what would happen to him by divination with a bullet in an Indian
moccasin. We had two servants who spoke old I