... As long as I can remember anything my best friend in the family was my brother Gouverneur, named after Uncle Gouv[erneur] Wilkins. As a very little boy, when he was away at school, I used to gather the best pears and other fruit and save them for him. He gave me my first rifle and taught me how to shoot it, and as soon as I was able to carry a gun we used to explore all the woodcock swamps in the neighborhood and across the river. ...
... Gouv was a walker who never tired; in Switzerland he walked the fifty miles over the Simplon Pass in one day. They tell me that in Florida he would start out with his gun early in the morning and tramp all day, with no lunch but a lemon. He was the best shot I ever saw. ...
... Gouv was educated by our private tutors until he went to "College Hill'* at Poughkeepsie, of which I have already spoken. They made a fine classical scholar of him, and begged my mother to let him go to college, but there was a good opening for him with Maitland, Phelps, so she put him there. I think she made a mistake, for the "counting-house," as it was called in those days, never suited him. In fact, she soon realized this and sent him to live with Isaac Conkling, who worked the Acker Farm for us on shares, to learn farming, which he really liked. ...
... When my mother died she left Gouv as my guardian. ... after my mother's death I was practically my own master, except in the matter of money, for Gouv held the purse-strings until I was grown up. ...
... I think it was in 1870 that Gouv went to live in Florida. He had often stayed at Hibernia, a delightful old plantation house on the St. John's kept by Mrs. Fleming, and became so fond of the Flemings and of the lovely place that he finally bought some land there and planted a magnificent orange-grove, which was very profitable until the great freeze of 1897, when all the trees were killed down to the ground. ...
... Gouv was the finest of men, temperate, honorable, and straightforward, kindly, loyal to his friends— good to look at, too, with his upright figure, ruddy face, and china-blue eyes. I loved him dearly. He died at Hibernia and is buried in the little churchyard there, a lovely, calm spot. A few years later I went again to Hibernia for the funeral of John Neilson, my brother-in-law and a warm friend of Gouv's. They are buried next to each other. In the evening — a sweet early-winter evening, with a light wind whispering in the pine-trees and stirring the veils of gray moss that drape their branches — I walked over to the churchyard. Palms and roses were piled at the heads of the two graves, side by side. It is a fitting resting-place for my dear Gouv, and the one he would have chosen and loved best. ...
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[Note: there is more about his life in this book]
