The Kinzers themselves were not there then.

But the bay and the inlet, with the fish and the crabs, and the ebbing and flowing tides, were there, very much the same, before Hendrik Hudson and his brave Dutchmen knew any thing whatever about that corner of the world.
The Kinzer farm had always been a reasonably "fat" one, both as to size and quality; and the good people who lived on it had generally been of a somewhat similar description.

It was, therefore, every way correct and becoming for Dabney Kinzer's widowed mother and his sisters to be the plump and hearty beings they were, and all the more discouraging to poor Dabney that no amount of regular and faithful eating seemed to make him resemble them at all in that respect.
Mrs.Kinzer excused his thinness, to her neighbors, to be sure, on the ground that he was "such a growing boy;" but, for all that, he caught himself wondering, now and then, if he would never be done with that part of his trials.

For rapid growth has its trials.
"The fact is," he said to himself one day, as he leaned over the north fence, "I'm more like Ham Morris's farm than I am like ours.

His farm is bigger than ours, all round; but it's too big for its fences, just as I'm too big for my clothes.