ing the old Episcopal clergyman who had baptized Gertrude to
baptize Gertrude's child, and in tacitly promising that the boy should
attend, if he pleased, the Episcopal Church when he grew older, his
mother having been a devoted Churchwoman. He kept the child with him in
the large, lonely New England house which even Gertrude Winthrop's
sweetness had not been able to make fully home-like and warm. For it had
been lived in too long, the old house, by a succession of Miss
Winthrops, conscientious old maids with narrow chests, thin throats, and
scanty little knobs of gray-streaked hair behind--the sort of good women
with whom the sense of duty is far keener than that of comfort, and in
whose minds character is apt to be gauged by the hour of getting up in
the morning. There had always been three or four Miss Winthrops of this
pattern in each generation; they began as daughters, passed into aunts,
and then into grandaunts, as nieces, growing up, took their first
positions from them. Andrew Winthrop himself had spent his childhood
among a number of these aunts--aunts both simple and "grand." But the
custom of the family had begun to change in his day; the aunts had taken
to leaving this earthly sphere much earlier than formerly (perhaps
because they had discovered that they could no longer attribute late
breakfasts to total depravity), so that when, his own youth past, he
brought his Gertrude home, there was not one left there; they were
alone.

The poor young mother, when death so soon came to her, begged that the
little son she was leaving behind might be called Evert, after her only
and dearly loved brother, Evert Beekman, who had died not long before.
Andrew Winthrop had consented. But he was resolved, at the same time,
that no Beekman, but only Winthrop, methods should be used in the
education of the child. The Winthrop methods were used; and with good
effect. But the boy learned something of the Beekman ways, after all, in
the delightful indulgence and petting he received from his aunt Katrina
when he went to visit her at vacation times, either at her city home or
at her old country-house on the Sound; he learned it in her affectionate
words, in the smiling freedom from rules and punishments which prevailed
at both places, in the wonderful toys, and, later, the dogs and gun,
saddle-horse and skiff, possessed by his fortunate cousin Lanse.

Andrew Winthrop was not that almost universal thing in his day for a man
in his