Note 1 — Chapter II

Since writing the above, I find in Scribner's Monthly for November 1880, the following notice of my uncle, which forms a sad sequel to a long career of untiring enthusiasm in the service of his fellow-creatures. It is the closing paragraph of an article headed "Bordentown and the Bonapartes," from the pen of Joseph B. Gilder:

"It yet remains to say a few words of Dr. John Isaac Hawkins—civil engineer, inventor, poet, preacher, phrenologist and 'mentor-general to mankind,'—who visited the village towards the close of the last century, married and lived there for many years; then disappeared, and, after a long absence, returned a gray old man, with a wife barely out of her teens. 'This isn't the wife you, took away, doctor,' some one ventured to remark. 'No,' the blushing girl replied, 'and he's buried one between us.' The poor fellow had hard work to gain a livelihood. For a time, the ladies paid him to lecture to them in their parlours; but when he brought a bag of skulls, and the heart and windpipe of his [adopted] son preserved in spirits, they would have nothing more to do with him. As a last resort, he started the 'Journal of Human Nature and Human Progress,' his wife 'setting up' for the press her husband's contributions in prose and rhyme. But the 'Journal' died after a brief and inglorious career. Hawkins claimed to have made the first survey for a tunnel under the Thames, and he invented the 'ever-pointed pencil,' the 'iridium-pointed gold pen,' and a method of condensing coffee. He also constructed a little stove with a handle, which he carried into the kitchen to cook his meals or into the reception-room when visitors called, and at night into his bedroom. He invented also a new religion, whose altar was erected in his own small parlour, where Dr. John Isaac Hawkins, priest, held forth to Mrs. John Isaac Hawkins, people. But a shadow stretched along the poor man's path from the loss of his only [adopted] son—'a companion in all of his philosophical researches,' who died and was dissected at the early age of seven. Thereafter the old man wandered, as 'lonely as a cloud,' sometimes in England, sometimes in America; but attended patiently and faithfully by his first wife, then by a second, and finally by a third, who clung to him with the devotion of Little Nell to her doting grandfather."