and
saved a dollar or so, just to show we could. Any and every thing we
commandeered to help maintain our solvency. Seattle was quite given to
food fairs in those days, and we kept a weather eye out for such. We
would eat no lunch, make for the Food Show about three, nibble at
samples all afternoon, and come home well-fed about eight, having bought
enough necessities here and there to keep our consciences from hurting.

Much of the time Carl had to be on the road selling bonds, and we almost
grieved our hearts out over that. In fact, we got desperate, and when
Carl was offered an assistant cashiership in a bank in Ellensburg,
Washington, we were just about to accept it, when the panic came, and it
was all for retrenchment in banks. Then we planned farming, planned it
with determination. It was too awful, those good-byes. Each got worse
and harder than the last. We had divine days in between, to be sure,
when we'd prowl out into the woods around the city, with a picnic lunch,
or bummel along the waterfront, ending at a counter we knew, which
produced, or the man behind it produced, delectable and cheap clubhouse
sandwiches.

The bond business, and business conditions generally in the Northwest,
got worse and worse. In March, after six months of Seattle, we were
called back to the San Francisco office. Business results were better,
Carl's salary was raised considerably, but there were still separations.

CHAPTER IV

On July 3, the Marvelous Son was born, and never was there such a
father. Even the trained nurse, hardened to new fathers by years of
experience, admitted that she never had seen any one take parenthood
quite so hard. Four times in the night he crept in to see if the baby
was surely breathing. We were in a very quiet neighborhood, yet the next
day, being Fourth of July, now and then a pop would be heard. At each
report of a cap-pistol a block away, Carl would dash out and vehemently
protest to a group of scornful youngsters that they would wake our son.
As if a one-day-old baby would seriously consider waking if a giant
fire-cracker went off under his bed!

Those were magic days. Three of us in the family instead of two--and
separations harder than ever. Once in all the ten and a half years we
were married I saw Carl Parker downright discouraged over his own
affairs, and that was the day I met him down town in Oakland and he
announced that he just could not stand the bond business any longer. He