"I'm glad he's a body," I said. "I wasn t sure." III _Our debt to William C. Westbury_ Before going deeper into this history I think I ought definitely to introduce William C. Westbury, who sold us the place. How few and lagging would have been our accomplishments without Westbury; how trifling seems our repayment as I review the years. Not only did he sell us the house, but he made its habitation possible; you will understand this as the pages pass. Westbury was a native of natives. By a collateral branch he, like his wife, had descended from our original owners, the ancient and honorable Meeker stock, who had acquired from the Crown a grant of one of the long lots (so called because, although of limited width, they had each a shore front on Long Island Sound) a fifteen-mile stretch of wood and hill and running water. His own homestead at the foot of the hill--the old-fashioned white house already mentioned--had been built a generation or two after ours, when with prosperity, or at least the means of easier accomplishment, the younger stock had gone in for a more pretentious setting. Whatever there was to know about Brook Ridge, Westbury knew--an all-wide Providence could scarcely know more. He knew every family, its history and inter-relationships. His favorite diversion was to take up and pursue some genealogical thread, to follow its mazy meanderings down the generations, dropping in curious bits of unwritten history--some of it spicy enough, some of it boisterously funny, some of it somber and gruesome, but all of it alive with the very color and savor of the land that was a part of himself, his inheritance from the generations of sturdy pioneers. Possibly Westbury's history was not always authentic, but if at times he drew on his imagination he tapped a noble source, for his narrative flowed clear, limpid, refreshing, and inexhaustible. When the days grew cooler and a fire was going in the big chimney, Westbury would drop in and, pulling up a big chair, would take out his knife and, selecting a soft, straight-grained piece of pine kindling, would whittle and look into the fire while he unwound the skein that threaded through the years from Azariah Meeker, or Ahab Todd, down to the few and scattering remnants that still flecked the huckleberry hills.