incts of religious essentials, which always kept her cheerful
and hopeful in spite of the gloomy doctrine imposed on her by her
education and surroundings. Believing firmly in the eternity of
hell-fire, with the logical and terrible day of judgment casting its
gloomy shadow over her life, she maintained an unbounded charity for
all humanity except herself, admitting the extenuation of ignorance
for all others, keeping for herself even to the tithes of mint and
cummin, but condoning, in her judgment of those who differed from her,
the offenses which for herself she would have thought mortal sins. In
her own household all latitude in religious observance was resisted
with all her strength.

In my paternal grandfather's house the Seventh Day was a day of
feasting, and after the church services all the connection went to the
ancestral home to eat the most sumptuous dinner of the week. Against
this infraction of the law which forbade on the Sabbath all work not
of mercy or necessity, my mother set her face, and when this was done
there was no long resistance possible and my father had to give way,
so that on that day we had a cold dinner, cooked on Friday. At sunset
on Friday, all work and all secular reading or amusements ceased,
and only a Sabbath day's journey was permitted so far as she could
control. But my father was a rover from his youth, and Saturday being
his only leisure day he used to take me with him on long walks in the
woods and fields, according to the season; and the weather and the
length of the day were his only limitations. In the house she ruled,
but out of it he made his own conscience, and so it happened that the
only pleasures that I owe him, except the bringing me a few books when
he came back from his business trips to New York to sell his machines,
were those long walks in the face of nature. He was, in his family,
apparently a cold, hard man, but out of it, kindly and benevolent,
melting always to distress which came in his way; with a passionate
love of animals and of nature. He was a poor business man, for he
could never press for the payment of debts due to him, but his honesty
was so rigid that it became a proverb in our town that a man should be
"as honest as old Joe Stillman," and that good name was all he gave or
left his children.

My father died in one of my occasional absences in Europe, and when I
saw my old mother in the black she never again laid off, she told me,
tranquilly and wit