"Oh!" ejaculated Anna Fleming, with such an air of anticipation that they all laughed, for they all knew Anna's weakness for ancestors; and this "Oh," said very plainly, "Now we are to hear of something more worth while than an old boatman, something probably about those aristocratic Knickerbocker ancestors of Kate's."
Kate herself, thoroughly appreciating Anna's state of mind, went on demurely: "This ancestor was my mother's great-great-grandfather. He was the son of a small farmer in England, and he came to New York a poor boy, with only a few shillings in his pocket; and with these few shillings he started, and, working at all sorts of things,—as a stevedore, and anything else he could find to do,—he at last worked his way up to a little clerkship in a little mercantile house, and from there he climbed step by step into a bigger clerkship, in the same little house, and then step by step into a clerkship in a big house, until after a while, after all sorts of working and waiting and hardships, he came to be at the head of the big house, and one of the first merchants of the day in New York. We have in our family now one of those English shillings that he brought over and saved for luck when he was working on the wharves, and we keep it for luck; and there is a packet of old letters and a diary he kept, telling the whole story, that we have too. Oh, yes, we are very proud of our great-great-great-grandfather, I can tell you," smiling up at the girls.
"But where did those lovely old shoe-buckles and gold buttons, and that old silver with the V. der B. engraved on it, that I saw when I visited you,—where did those come from, if that boatman was the only Dutch ancestor you had that you were proud of?" anxiously and disappointedly asked Anna here.
"Oh, they came from some of the later V. der B.'s; some descendants that had nothing specially interesting about them,—were not heroes of any kind, but just rich old burghers."
"But weren't they what are called the Knickerbocker families?"
"Yes; but you know how that name came to be given to them, don't you?"
"No, not exactly," answered Anna, shamefacedly.
"And I haven't the least idea. I know I ought to know, but I don't," burst out Myra, blithely and boldly; "so do tell us."
"Well, it came about in this way. Washington Irving wrote a burlesque history of New York,—that is, it was a burlesque on a pompous handbook of the city, that had just been published. He called it 'A History of New York from the beginning of the world to the end of the Dutch Dynasty, by Diedrich Knickerbocker.'
"He made up the name of Knickerbocker probably, as people now make up a name for a nom de plume. But at the time by a facetious advertisement, such as Hawthorne might have written at a later day,—an advertisement 'inquiring for a small, elderly gentleman, dressed in an old black coat and cocked hat, by the name of Knickerbocker, who was said to have disappeared from the Columbus Hotel in Mulberry Street, and left behind a very curious kind of a written book,'—he fooled some of those Dutch ancestors of mine into thinking that this was a veritable Dutch name, and that this old gentleman was a veritable owner of the name, and writer of the History of New York, which they thought was meant for a veritable history. Then some of them finding it was a burlesque were seriously offended, and made a great fuss about it; but in spite of all this, the name stuck, and as it was really meant as a sort of interpretation of the aristocratic Dutch character, it was after a while accepted as a title for the descendants of the old Dutch burghers, and so grew into a term for the gentry or aristocratic class. That is all there is to it."