specially the prominent men,
indulged in ardent spirits.

One of my young friends induced me to go to dinner with him at Van
Brocklin's, the fashionable restaurant of a near city. We had a bottle
of wine and some adventures and I was sick for a week after it. Every
day of that week I attended a convention of my ancestors and received
much good advice. Toward the end of it my friend came to see me.

"There's no use of my trying to be a gentleman," I said. "I fear that
another effort would hang my pelt on the door. It's a disgrace,
probably, but I've got to be good. I'm driven to it."

"The way I look at it is this," said he. "We're young fellows and making
a good deal of money and we can't tell when we'll die and leave a lot
that we'll never get any good of."

It was a down-country, aristocratic view of the responsibilities of
youth and quite new to me. Caligula was worried in a like manner, I
believe. We had near us there a little section of the old world which
was trying, in a half-hearted fashion, to maintain itself in the midst
of a democracy. It was the manorial life of the patroons--a relic of
ancient feudalism which had its beginning in 1629, when The West Indies
Company issued its charter of Privileges and Exemptions. That charter
offered to any member of the company who should, within four years,
bring fifty adults to the New Netherlands and establish them along the
Hudson, a liberal grant of land, to be called a manor, of which the
owner or patroon should be full proprietor and chief magistrate. The
settlers were to be exempt from taxation for ten years, but under bond
to stay in one place and develop it. In the beginning the patroon built
houses and barns and furnished cattle, seed and tools. The tenants for
themselves and their heirs agreed to pay him a fixed rent forever in
stock and produce and, further, to grind at the owner's mill and neither
to hunt nor fish.

Judge Westbrook, in whose office I worked, was counsel and collector for
the patroons, notably for the manors of Livingston and Van
Renssalaer--two little kingdoms in the heart of the great republic.

I spent two years at my work and studied in the office of the learned
judge with an ever-present but diminishing sense of homesickness. I
belonged to the bowling and athletic club and had many friends.

Mr. Louis Latour, of Jefferson County, whom I had met in the company of
Mr. Dunkelberg, came during my last year there to study law in the
off