88 LIFE OF BENJAMIN SILLIMAN. 



Professor Hubbard, my son, B. S., Jr., and his wife, and 

 young William Silliman Hillyer of New Albany, Indiana, 

 grandson of my elder half brother, with myself, left home 

 at eight o'clock, A. M. ; the depot at eight and three quar- 

 ters, on the rails of the New Haven and New York road, 

 and were at Bridgeport, eighteen miles, before ten o'clock. 

 Here, by previous arrangement, carriages were ready, and 

 we all proceeded three miles, by old Pequamoc, noticing 

 by the way interesting objects, as the site of the old 

 school-house, now removed, where my brother, G. S. S., 

 and I, were taught the elements of knowledge ; also, 

 Knopp's mill, one mile from my father's mansion, where 

 was formerly our grinding-place ; the place also for washing 

 sheep, and a considerable fishery of alewives by the seine. 

 We next saw the beginning of my father's land, in the 

 duck-pond pasture, a tract of probably seventy acres ; there 

 were seven tracts of land, one of them the homestead, 

 and six others in different places, some at from one mile 

 to four miles distant. As we went up the hill, I pointed 

 out the spot where they found me, a little wanderer, of two 

 years old, strayed half a mile from home, lost for the time, 

 looked for anxiously in the well and in many other 

 places, but found at last, sitting quietly on a stone by the 

 bars, where the cows were put into the pasture. I showed 

 also the field where my father's fine bald-faced horse lost 

 his life, after surviving the battles of the Revolution, in 

 several of which he had been rode : the servant went down, 

 on a Sabbath morning, to lead him up for service, as we 

 lived two miles from the town, but we found him with both 

 fore-legs broken short off. He had Stepped into a crevice 

 between the two contiguous portions of a fissure rock, and 



had fallen sidewise The old house, formerly my 



uncle Ebenezer's, and built by him, being the elder brother 

 of my father, was sold to Mr. Eliot, after the burning of 

 Fairfield, in July, 1779, who, under my father's influence 

 and patronage, removed to Holland Hill, Mr. Eliot's house 



