A Dutch Boy Fifty Years After Author:Edward Bok Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: A DUTCH BOY FIFTY YEARS AFTER CHAPTER I THE FIRST DATS IN AMERICA The leviathan of the Atlantic Ocean, in 1870, was Queen, and when she was warped into... more » her dock on Septenv her 20 of that year, she discharged, among her passengers, a family of four from the Netherlands who were to make an experiment of Americanization. The father, a man bearing one of the most respected names in the Netherlands, had acquired wealth and position for himself; unwise investments, however, had swept away his fortune, and in preference to a new start in his own land, he had decided to make the new beginning in the United States, where a favorite brother-in-law had gone several years before. But that, never a simple matter for a man who has reached forty-two, is particularly difficult for a foreigner in a strange land. This fact he and his wife were to find out. The wife, also carefully reared, had been accustomed to a scale of living which she had now to abandon. Her Americanization experiment was to compel her, for the first time in her life, to become a housekeeper without domestic help. There were two boys: the elder, William, was eight and a half years of age; the younger, in nineteen days from his landing-date, was to celebrate his seventh birthday. This younger boy was Edward William Bok. He had, according to the Dutch custom, two other names, but he had decided to leave those in the Netherlands. And the American public was, in later years, to omit for him the "William." Edward's first six days in the United States were spent in New York, and then he was taken to Brooklyn, where he was destined to live for nearly twenty years. Thanks to the linguistic sense inherent in the Dutch, and to an educational system that compels the study of languages, English was already familiar...« less