nt leaping up the stairs, even when she was over eighty. Fear was
absolutely unknown to her. She once caught a mad dog and held its
mouth shut with her hands, protecting her children till help came.
She was resourceful in emergency, whether it was sickness or accident,
and never lost her presence of mind. She had a tender sympathy for
animals and all weak, suffering, and young creatures, and it could be
truthfully said of her, as of Joeran Kyn, her ancestor, that she "never
irritated even a child." Her daughter Fanny said of her: "I never
heard my mother speak an angry word, no matter what the provocation,
and she was the mother of seven children. No matter what the offense
might be she always found an excuse." In this she was like the old
Scotch woman who, when told she would find something to praise even in
the devil, said: "Weel, there's nae denyin' he's a verra indoostrious
body."

It was from our little mother that my sister Fanny inherited her vivid
dark beauty, her reticence, her fortitude in suffering, her
fearlessness in the presence of danger, and her unfailing
resourcefulness.

Jacob Leendertsen Van de Grift, the first paternal ancestor of whom we
have any record, settled in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, towards the
close of the seventeenth century. The graves of several of his
descendants are still to be seen in the fine old cemetery at
Andalusia, and upon the tombstone of one of them is this epitaph:

"Farewell my friends and wife so dear,
I am not dead but sleeping here.
My debts are paid, my grave you see."

This name has descended in an unbroken line from Jacob Leendertsen Van
de Grift, of New Amsterdam, through eleven generations, to the
brother of Fanny Stevenson, Jacob Van de Grift, of Riverside,
California.

John Miller, a paternal great-grandfather of ours, was also Dutch. The
family account of him is that he fought at Brandywine, crossed the
Delaware with Washington, was wounded at the battle of Trenton, and
that when he died, at the age of eighty-four years, the city of
Philadelphia paid him the tribute of burial with military honours.

Miller married twice, and it was Elizabeth, a daughter by his second
wife, who married a Jacob Van de Grift.

Her son, Jacob Van de Grift, was born in Philadelphia in 1816. Upon
the early death of her first husband she married again, presenting to
her children the cruel stepfather of fiction. Indeed, the story of our
father's childhood and