CHAPTER I. 



RECORD OF A BUSY LIFE. 



HARLES HALLOCK, editor, author and naturalist, was born in New 

 York City March 13, 1634, son of Gerard and Eliza (Allen) Hallock. 

 The family was founded in America when Peter Hallock (or Holy- 

 oake) located at Southold, L. I., thirteen colonists, led by Rev. John 

 Young, of Hingham, Norfolk County, England, who landed in New 

 Haven, Conn., October 21, 1640. He subsequently received from Governor Dougan. 

 under James II., a grant of 40,000 acres of land lying between Southampton and 

 Montauk Point. The obituary notice of William, son of Peter, the founder of the 

 Southold Colony, who died September 30, 1684, and is so recorded, is spelled 

 Holyoake. 



Through his mother he is descended from Rev. Thomas Mayhew, Governor 

 of Nantucket and Martha's Vineyard, under a grant from Lord Sterling in 1614. 

 Of their descendants, one branch became Quakers, and to this Fitz Greene Halleck, 

 the poet belonged ; others comprised among their numbers eminent fighting men, 

 distinguished in the American revolution and since, both on land and sea. During 

 the revolution Joseph Hallock fell as commander of a privateer ; William Halleck 

 commanded packet boats on Long Island Sound ; another William Hallock owned 

 and commanded a vessel sunk by the English ship Snow, and had two sons, 

 Jeremiah and Moses, who were also soldiers of the revolution. During the Civil 

 War many members of the family fought in support of the Union, notably Major- 

 General Henry W. Halleck. 



A portion of Charles Hallock's life was passed on his uncle's farm, at Plain- 

 held, in a wilderness section of the Green Mountains in Massachusetts, where he 

 imbibe'd those tastes for outdoor sports and adventure which so largely shaped his 

 course through life. In those youthful days he occupied a secluded shooting box 

 on the estate in preference to the farm house, except in coldest winter weather. 



Having fitted for college at Hopkins Grammar School, in New Haven, Conn., 

 he entered Yale in 1850, but subsequently went to Amherst, where, in 1862, during 

 his sophomore year, he printed a college paper named the Scorpion. This seems to 

 have been his first journalistic venture, and the taste for newspaper work then 

 imbibed, or more probably inherited from his father, who was at that time the 

 active head of the New York Journal of Commerce, induced him to discontinue his 

 collegiate course of study early in the junior year and enter the printing office of 

 his father. There he mastered the rudiments of a journalistic education. Although 

 not a college graduate, the faculty of Amherst subsequently conferred upon him, 

 in 1871, the degree of A. B. Extraordinary, the first honor of the kind which it had 

 conferred. In the spring of 1855 he attached himself to the New Haven Register, 

 and conducted that paper for a year and a half for its proprietor, M. A. Osborn, 

 Esq., then collector of the port. In August, 1856, he accepted a salary and one- 

 sixteenth proprietary interest in the Journal of Commerce, and remained until 

 September, 1861, when the political troubles threw him out of his chair, but not of 

 his ownership in the paper, which at that time had increased to about one-tenth. 



