If it isn't a Sarles, it's a Sniffen; and with Brundages, Platts, and Jays, the Sniffens date back to when the acres of the first Charles Ferris ran from the Boston post road to the coach road to Albany, and when the first Gouverneur Morris stood on one of his hills and saw the Indian canoes in the Hudson and in the Sound and rejoiced that all the land between belonged to him.
If you do not believe in heredity, the fact that Jimmie's great-great-grandfather was a scout for General Washington and hunted deer, and even bear, over exactly the same hills where Jimmie hunted weasles will count for nothing.

It will not explain why to Jimmie, from Tarrytown to Port Chester, the hills, the roads, the woods, and the cow-paths, caves, streams, and springs hidden in the woods were as familiar as his own kitchen garden, nor explain why, when you could not see a Pease and Elliman "For Sale" sign nailed to a tree, Jimmie could see in the highest branches a last year's bird's nest.
Or why, when he was out alone playing Indians and had sunk his scout's axe into a fallen log and then scalped the log, he felt that once before in those same woods he had trailed that same Indian, and with his own tomahawk split open his skull.

Sometimes when he knelt to drink at a secret spring in the forest, the autumn leaves would crackle and he would raise his eyes fearing to see a panther facing him.
"But there ain't no panthers in Westchester," Jimmie would reassure himself.

And in the distance the roar of an automobile climbing a hill with the muffler open would seem to suggest he was right.

But still Jimmie remembered once before he had knelt at that same spring, and that when he raised his eyes he had faced a crouching panther.