Returning by the river from Oswego to Albany, the Macvicars became intimate with Madame Margarita Schuyler (1701–1782), who had then left her mansion on The Flats, and purchased a house in that town.. Mr. Macvicar, retiring on half-pay from the army in 1765, received a grant of land from the government, and purchased from two fellow officers their land grants. These lands, lying adjacent, after being cleared, seemed to Mr. Macvicar to be ideal for a fertile and profitable estate. Mr. Macvicar hired men to survey and map his lands, and also at the time reasonably expected that his [sic] Township of Clarendon would in a few years become a very valuable property. Meanwhile, Mr. Macvicar became the tenant of Madame Schuyler’s new house at The Flats, in the township of Claverac, and of a few adjacent acres of land. At this period of her life, Grant had two homes, usually spending the summer with her parents, presumably at Invernahyle in Scotland, and the winter with Madame Schuyler at Albany. She had lived among Dutch settlers, French Huguenots, English soldiers, African-American slaves, and Mohawk people. She had learned the Dutch language among her young friends at Albany, and had frequented the summer wigwams of the indigenous peoples. She could talk their language sufficiently well to make herself understood by those women and children who were accustomed to European conversations. All this knowledge, Grant had amassed by the time that she was ten years of age. Her acquaintance with books at that period was proportionately small. Soon after her arrival in America, she had been taught needlework and the elements of reading by her mother, and a soldier had given her lessons in pot-hooks, hangers, and joining-hand. The family Bible, and a Scotch sergeant's copy of Blind Harry's The Wallace were the earliest books to which she had access, and she derived from studying the latter on the banks of Lake Ontario an enthusiastic feeling for Scotland, which lasted through life. On the voyage back to Albany, from the garrison at Oswego, staying a while at Fort Brewerton, Captain Mungo Campbell, the commander, presented her with an illustrated copy of the Paradise Lost. This, with the aid of a tattered copy of Nathan Bailey's Dictionary, she learned at last to understand. It served her in the first instance as a vocabulary, then as a story book, and subsequently as an incentive