Of this there was no doubt.

That, later, on moving to New York, his descendants became peace-loving salesmen did not affect his record.

To enter a society founded on heredity, the important thing is first to catch your ancestor, and having made sure of him, David entered the Society of the Sons of Washington with flying colors.
He was not unlike the man who had been speaking prose for forty years without knowing it.

He was not unlike the other man who woke to find himself famous.

He had gone to bed a timid, near-sighted, underpaid salesman without a relative in the world, except a married sister in Bordentown, and he awoke to find he was a direct descendant of "Neck or Nothing" Greene, a revolutionary hero, a friend of Washington, a man whose portrait hung in the State House at Trenton.