Frank knew his father liked to have his family around him. “I don’t remember my mother at all,” he would say. “As for my father, he was away fighting when I was a boy. And after I went to Harvard, I never saw him again.” At home in the evening he’d sit in his wing chair by the fire, and his wife and five children—the four girls and young Frank—would all have to be there, and he’d play games or read to them. Weston would read amusing books, like Washington Irving’s tale of Rip Van Winkle, or the funny history of New York, told by his invented Dutchman Diedrich Knickerbocker. “Why is he called Diedrich?” he would ask. “Because he Died Rich,” the children would chorus.

Every summer, the whole family would spend two weeks with Aunt Abigail and her family in Westchester County, and another couple of weeks with their cousins up in Dutchess County. The more members of his family he had around him, the happier Weston Master seemed to be.

But last month, when the governor had invited him to come north for the opening of the big canal, Weston had said: “I’ll just take Frank with me.”

It wasn’t the first time Frank had been up the Hudson River. Three years earlier, soon after his seventh birthday, there had been a bad outbreak of yellow fever in New York. There was often some fever in the port. “The ships bring it from the south,” his father would say. “And we’re always at risk. New York’s as hot as Jamaica in the summer, you know.” But when a lot of people in the city had started dying, Weston had taken his whole family upriver to Albany until it was over.

Frank had enjoyed that journey. On the way up, they’d gazed west at the Catskill Mountains, and his father had reminded them: “That’s where Rip Van Winkle fell asleep.” Frank had liked Albany. The busy town was the capital of New York State now. His father had said this was a good idea, since Manhattan was at the bottom end of the state, and had plenty of business anyway, but Albany was nearer the middle, and growing fast. One day, Weston had taken them all to the old fort at Ticonderoga, and told them how the Americans had taken it from the British. Frank wasn’t very interested in history, but he’d enjoyed seeing the geometric lines of the old stone walls and the gun emplacements.