four years more.) We could understand but little of
what she said after she was taken ill. She used to repeat a line from an
old hymn--"Only a veil between."

She thought a good deal of some verses I wrote--"My Brother's Farm"--and
had them framed. (You have seen them in the parlor at the Old Home. I
wrote them in Washington the fall that you were born. I was sick and
forlorn at the time.)

I owe to Mother my temperament, my love of nature, my brooding,
introspective habit of mind--all those things which in a literary man
help to give atmosphere to his work. In her line were dreamers and
fishermen and hunters. One of her uncles lived alone in a little house
in the woods. His hut was doubtless the original Slabsides. Grandfather
Kelly was a lover of solitude, as all dreamers are, and Mother's
happiest days, I think, were those spent in the fields after berries.
The Celtic element, which I get mostly from her side, has no doubt
played an important part in my life. My idealism, my romantic
tendencies, are largely her gift.

On my father's side I find no fishermen or hermits or dreamers. I find a
marked religious strain, more active and outspoken than on Mother's. The
religion of the Kellys was, for the most part, of the silent, meditative
kind, but there are preachers and teachers and scholars on Father's
side--one of them, Stephen Burroughs (b. 1765), a renegade preacher.
Doubtless most of my own intellectual impetus comes from this side of
the family. There are also cousins and second cousins on this side who
became preachers, and some who became physicians, but I recall none on
the Kelly side.

In size and physical make-up I am much like my father. I have my
father's foot, and I detect many of his ways in my own. My loud and
harmless barking, when I am angered, I get from him. The Kellys are
more apt to bite. I see myself, too, in my brothers, in their looks and
especially in their weaknesses. Take from me my special intellectual
equipment, and I am in all else one of them.

(Speaking of their characteristics as a family, Mr. Burroughs says that
they have absolute inability to harbor resentment (a Celtic trait); that
they never have "cheek" to ask enough for what they have to sell, lack
decision, and are easily turned from their purpose. Commenting on this,
he has often said: "We are weak as men--do not make ourselves felt in
the community. But this very weakness is a help to me as a writer upon
Nature. I don't