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Franklin Asbury Hawkins was the first child, which followed the union of Captain Franklin Hawkins of Islip and Miss Cynthia Clock, the daughter of a very respectable family.

Mr. and Mrs. Hawkins moved in the best society of the township.

Franklin Hawkins was in the lumber trade and amassed a comfortable fortune.

The couple lived in fine style, and the infant Asbury was surrounded

with comfort and luxury. He was a cold, sullen child, repaying the indulgence of his parents

and those that surrounded him by vicious and vindictive ways and stolid insensibility to kindness. In point of feeling he was not merely cold.

He loved cruelty and reveled in the inflicting pain on harmless animals. To choke a kitten or tear the

legs from a quivering frog was a delightful recreation to him. Miss Hawkins used to say,

Oh, he'll outgrow those little tricks. He is only a child and does not appreciate what he is doing.

One of these little tricks was to forage among the neighbors and filts quite a collection of cats.

These he tied up in a bunch and he watched the commotion as they tore and clawed each other

into weariness, his pale eyes watering with intense enjoyment.

When the wretched animals had fought themselves weary, he took the bag and flung it into the

blazing furnace of his father's molding

mill. At school, he was shunned by his schoolmates and loathed by his teachers. Once, after tearing

a kitten asunder before some of the children, one of the teachers had sense enough to give the little

devil a tremendous trouncing.

His mother incensed at this treatment of her idolized young fiend,

sent him to Hackettstown, New Jersey to another school,

from which he was expelled in disgrace soon after.

When he was 15, through his mother's influence, he was accepted as a member

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