CHAPTER I.
THE FIRST DAYS IN AMERICA The leviathan of the Atlantic Ocean, in 1870, was _The Queen_, and when she was warped into her dock on September 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.