The younger of these Dr. Johnsons--for they both received the degree of Doctor of Divinity from the University of Oxford--had a daughter Elizabeth, who married Daniel Crommelin Verplanck, the son of Samuel Verplanck, and the only fruit of their marriage was the subject of this memoir. The fair-haired young mother was a frequent visitor with her child to Stratford, where, under the willow trees from Twickenham, as appears from some of her letters, he learned to walk. She died when he was but three years old, leaving the boy to the care of his grandmother, by whom he was indulgently yet carefully reared. The grandmother is spoken of as a lively little lady, often seen walking up Wall Street, dressed in pink satin and in dainty high heeled shoes, with a quaint jewelled watch swinging 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."