MY father was Archibald Cary, of Carysbrooke—all old-time Virginians loved to write themselves down as part of their parental estates—son of Wilson Jefferson Cary, a nephew of Thomas Jefferson, whose marriage with Miss Virginia Randolph had taken place at Monticello; upon which occasion the bride was given away by the master of the house, who hung around her neck a little pearl necklace sent for by him to Paris, and still treasured by her descendants. There remains also a copy of “Don Quixote” in French, lovingly inscribed by Mr. Jefferson to my grandmother.

Jefferson's mother, it will be recalled, was Jane, daughter of Isham Randolph; and when, in 1790, Martha Jefferson married Thomas Mann Randolph, she and her husband claimed a great-great-grandfather in common. Young Randolph having lived with the Jeffersons for two years in Paris, completing his education under Mr. Jefferson's direction at the University of Edinburgh, was entirely at home in the household of his future wife; so much so, that after their marriage he brought into it his little sister, Virginia, whose wit and charm, with her gift of making sweet music, appealed to Mr. Jefferson as strongly as did her motherless condition. Miss Randolph grew up under her sister-in-law's devoted care, and to Mr. Jefferson owed the intellectual impetus he so well knew how to give to a girl's education.

She was by him inspired with the love of letters and habit of authorship that marked her in later years, when Mrs. Cary's novels, essays, and poems enjoyed considerable vogue. My father always spoke to me admiringly of his good mother's literary achievements, when, as a very little girl perched upon his knee, I listened in charmed awe to the tales of a grandmamma who was a real live author, publishing every scrap of MS. as fast as she wrote it; and said by the critics to combine the style of Hannah More with a grace and humor all her own. When I tried to read her books it must be owned that I thought them rather too grave and sermon-like for human nature's daily food. Not until many years had gone over my head did I appreciate them at their rightful value.

My father, an old-line Whig of the enthusiastic type, yet had great personal admiration for and loved to talk about his “Uncle Jefferson,” the “Father of American Democracy.” Certainly, he induced all of us, and our children after us, to look with appreciation upon Jefferson's splendid originality of thought and fearless expression of opinion, still more upon the breadth of his interest in the whole human field of intellectual endeavor, which made him a pharos in his time. Mr. Henry Watterson has well expressed our united family opinion in saying that, after Washington and Franklin, the one clear figure in the early history of American politics is Jefferson—“a perfect Doric column.”

My son, Congressman Francis Burton Harrison, is fortunate in possessing a fine Gilbert Stuart portrait of Jefferson. Strangely enough, there is a strong likeness in this, as in the St. Memin profiles of Jefferson, to various members of the family in the present generations.

A crackling (alas! time-dried) letter lying before me, addressed by my father to his sister, Mrs. Gouverneur Morris, of Morrisania, “Harlaem, New York,” announces the arrival in this world of his daughter Constance, stating that “although she has red hair, he hopes if nothing happens she will not be a homely girl; of this, however, nothing can be said with certainty. The upper part of her head is very much like our mother's, so that “should she live, I anticipate for her some of her grandmother's talent for writing, particularly as I have great confidence in phrenology.” This I insert more as a contribution to the annals of the science of bumps than with confidence in its interest to the public.

The Carys of my father's line had been scholars, leaders, and land-owners in the Virginia colony since 1640, and before that were well known in south-western Britain.

The head of the house is Byron Plantagenet, Viscount Falkland, a worthy inheritor of the family title of the great Lucius Cary, Viscount Falkland, who died on the field at Newberry for England's glory and his own. Of late years it has been a pleasure to me to meet in my recurrent visits to London the family of the present viscount, and to be welcomed into their hospitable home, filled with portraits and relics, some of which are duplicated in our transatlantic dwellings.

Lord Falkland, whose wife was Miss Mary Reade, of New York, has a household of handsome sons and daughters, his eldest son, possessing the picturesque title of the Master of Falkland. Of the Carys of Virginia, a noteworthy one was Colonel Archibald Cary, of Ampthill, near Richmond, on the James, known as “Old Iron” in the American Revolution. He married a Miss Randolph of the Curls branch of that numerous family. Through these Curls Randolphs we have received a dash of Pocahontas blood, and I have found no reason to decry this attenuated strain of descent from the long-gone little Indian princess whose high fidelity and noble unselfishness made its indelible mark upon colonial history.

It must be owned we were brought up to think of our Randolph blood as a slightly menacing inheritance. “They were clever, every man and woman of them,” said a family oracle,“often brilliant, successful, fascinating—but, beware, my dear, of eccentricity! Look at your cousin, John of Roanoke! He began by being one of the most beautiful and innocent looking lads the world ever beheld, as anyone can see from that picture of him in boyhood, painted by Gilbert Stuart; and look what a miserable life he led,” etc., etc.

We did not trouble our heads much about the transmission of physical tendencies by descent in those days, and found the strange stories of our morbid kinsman very much to our taste. As leader of the Jefferson party in Congress at twenty-eight, also chairman of the Committee of Ways and Means, we felt very proud of him.

We were to hear of Randolph of Roanoke in more substantial fashion just before the war began. His estate, devolving upon his insane brother, St. George, who had lived in retirement all these years, was finally divided between Randolph heirs at large, among whom my brother and myself were numbered. We received, to my great satisfaction, several “plums” in the way of executor's checks, a condition pleasingly continuing until after I was married and living in New York, and then the fountain ceased to flow. Various members of the family put these odd fragments of Randolph inheritance into souvenir rings and silver tea-sets, to be handed down in memoriam of the unhappy genius, the shooting-star of the Randolph galaxy.

My father was at the time of his death just entering upon his fortieth year (a period traditionally dreaded by Cary men as likely to cut short their mortal span), living in the beautiful mountain town of Cumberland, in Maryland, where he was editor of its leading newspaper, The Cumberland Civilian. Bred in the practice of literary study, well equipped in history, a classic by descent from men educated at English universities, and owners of the best libraries in the State, he was also an ardent Whig politician, and has left printed pamphlets, speeches, and editorials breathing the fiery spirit of his creed. One of my earliest recollections was being taken as a very small child to a hotel in Cumberland to visit his idol, Henry Clay, then an aged man, who lifted me in his arms and kissed me, to my secret discomfiture, as I thought him dreadfully old and ugly. A gentleman present remarked: “Little girl, you must never forget that you started in life with a kiss and a blessing from the immortal Henry Clay.”

Of that interview I ought to have retained a silver pencil-case, which I promptly lost.

My father, when a young lawyer of three-and-twenty, had married his cousin Monimia, youngest daughter of Thomas, ninth Lord Fairfax, Baron of Cameron in the Scottish peerage, who, residing quietly on his estates in Virginia, had never assumed his title except when going once to England to claim an inheritance.

My grandparents sometimes took a house in Washington for the season, and there my mother, making her début at seventeen, had been admired and belauded in the society of the capital. Chapman, the artist, engaged to paint “The Baptism of Pocahontas” for the rotunda of the Capitol, asked leave to introduce her into his picture as one of the two Englishwomen, their heads wrapped in scarfs, who stand directly behind the kneeling Pocahontas. My mother, at this time, made friends with Mr. and Mrs. N. P. Willis, he greatly extolling her beauty and inviting her to accompany them to various festivities. She remembered going to see them one day in their sitting-room at a hotel, and finding the lion still at his breakfast, in a gorgeous dressing-gown and smoking-cap, like Thackeray's “Clarence Bulbul,” with a page-boy kneeling before the fire at his feet, toasting each mouthful of bread as demanded by his fastidious master, Willis declaring it was “the only way to make toast tolerable,” to the amusement of the little Virginia girl bred in simplicity by her austere sire.

There is a story of the wedding-journey of this very young couple, Mr. and Mrs. Archibald Cary, when they travelled, as the custom was, to New York, stopping at some Broadway hotel, where, on the day of their arrival, the bridegroom went off alone to visit Trinity Church and church-yard. She was but eighteen, had never been so far from home before, and as lunch-time came and her husband did not, feared to go down to the big dining-room alone, because people “stared at her so.” (The Rev. Dr. Philip Slaughter, a learned historian of Virginia, wrote to me once, “I have a vivid picture of your mother in my memory, when, as Burke said of the young Queen of France, ‘She first arose above the horizon of womanhood, and shone like the morning star, full of life and splendor and beauty.’ ”) When the recreant returned, hours after, full of concern and loving apology, his excuse was that he had been copying inscriptions on the tombstones in Trinity church-yard, and had no idea how the time flew.

My antiquarian progenitor seems, indeed, to have resembled that learned lawyer of the fifteenth century, William Budaeus, who, upon his wedding-day, stole away from his bride for six hours to hold converse with the mighty dead through his books.

Of the marriage of Archibald Cary and Monimia Fairfax, the fifth between these two families, were born three children, two sons, Falkland and Clarence, and myself. My brother Falkland, who died at sixteen, was one of those rare beings sent into the world to adumbrate perfection, then cut short in the flower of youth, to the bewilderment of mortals who cannot grasp the meaning of the Creator's scheme. As he lay after death, face and form were like one of the recumbent statues of sleeping Greeks in the galleries at Rome. All intellectual exercise was facile to him, languages ancient and modern were acquired without effort, and his literary compositions won the astonished comment of his teachers. Join to this an incomparably sweet temper and a great love of physical exercise, and his loss to his family may be understood.

My brother Clarence and I have kept together through a long life of harmonious association, varied by much travel and experience of people and places; we look back pleasantly upon our life in Cumberland, in the brown modern Gothic house in Decatur Street, with its tower and balconies (which must have seemed rather spectacular in the quiet old town) bought by our father for his little family. In the tower I kept a small regiment of dolls with whom I used to enact plays from a tattered old copy of Dick's “Shakespeare,” reading all the parts myself. I was once near hating my good parents and a friend of theirs, who, unknown to me, had crept up the tower stairs to listen laughingly to one of these performances. In our nursery my brother and I made tents out of bedclothes, and told each other, successively, stories of original travel and adventure, we who had never voyaged anywhere save from “the blue bed to the brown.” The boys once had a mock trial, condemned and hung over the battlements a doll of mine, whose fate nearly broke my heart; but I enjoyed it, nevertheless. My father, very indulgent to his only girl, used to delight me with endless stories. Particularly did I relish those of the French-Indian campaign in that very neighborhood and of young Colonel Washington's return from the disastrous venture to Mount Vernon, where our mother's grandfather, Colonel William Fairfax of Belvoir, his son George the Tory (Washington's old comrade in surveying), and George's fascinating wife Sally, our father's great-aunt, had hastened to console the young Achilles sulking in his tent by kind notes and visits.

I loved all the gossip about the Mount Vernon and Belvoir families, and felt as if they still lived in my day. Then there were Indian massacres of the most exciting sort, the scenes of occurrence in the mountain fastnesses around us; and often was I bid to travel over-sea, and hear about the mother-land and the people we sprang from there. But, affectionate to England, my father believed with all his heart in the ideal of our own republic and its institutions. He used to describe how its borders would go on broadening till it compassed the whole mighty continent; and once pointed out to me suddenly, in the red glow of sunset, the splendid cleft in the Alleghanies through which a river and a railway ran, westward of the town. “That, my daughter, is the gateway for the future greatness of our land,” he said, so impressively that I looked to see some actual titanic form with trailing garments sweep outward through the gorge.

My education was carried on at day-school, in the polite establishment for young ladies of a Miss Jane Kenah, where I must have done something, however inadequate, to win from her the copy of “The Lady of the Lake,” in faded red and gold, which still haunts my book-shelves, “Presented to Constance Cary, as a reward for scholarship, by her loving teacher.” I honestly do not now believe I deserved it in the least, for I did not enjoy that school, nor yet the lessons in Latin imposed upon me by my father, at the hands of the amiable and learned Rev. Hillhouse Buel, in his study at the rectory. I must have made them a misery to my instructor! And as to mathematics in general, I have always considered them an invention of the evil one!

The Rev. Mr. Buel, a distinguished father in the church, was in my eyes chiefly an incarnation of the Spirit of Ritualism in which my darling mother took strange satisfaction. His beautiful church stood on a bold bluff over the river dividing the town; our house was at a good distance on the other side; and many a time, during Lent especially, I was haled from my warm bed in the gray dawn of a winter's morning, dressed hastily without breakfast (my mother fasted on Fridays in Lent till after sunset), and made to accompany her on a brisk, chill walk to matins, celebrated by the rector, in the almost empty church, for the benefit of a literal “two or three.” Once, she, I, and the celebrant were the only persons present on a stormy morning. On Sundays our family filled the first pew in the left transept, after a preceding hour of Sunday-school for the juveniles. When doctrine became too heavy for me I plaited the fringe of my mother's embroidered shawl of China crepe, to me the most sumptuous of garments, which she would afterward find woven into as many little kinks as a darky's wool.

The rule of our house was firm if loving. There was no weak yielding by either parent to our whims. Our pleasures were of a simple sort: long walks on the hills, flower-picking, skating in winter, and sledding over “jumps” on the snow-clad heights above our home; excursions to Flintstone, Frostburg, and the Mines; tea-parties with our little friends and, at rare intervals, a show at some town-hall, into which we walked proudly with free tickets as children of the editor. I think we heard Mme. Anna Bishop sing. My brother's sled bore her name in crimson letters.

There was a grand triple entertainment for grown people, given by my mother and her neighbors, Mrs. Thruston and Mrs. Davidson, living diagonally opposite us on Decatur Street. The invitations, printed in silver at the office of The Civilian, bid their friends repair to Mrs. Thruston, who lived in a wide, handsome old house in a terraced garden, at eight o'clock, for the reception; to Mrs. Cary, who possessed a large drawing-room and veranda, at nine, for dancing: and to Mrs. Davidson (whose husband was a brother of the poetesses Lucretia and Margaret Davidson), for supper, at eleven. Allowed to sit up for this unprecedented festivity, I recall the guests assembling duly in Mrs. Thruston's stately rooms, to sip Madeira and lemonade and taste her excellent plum-cake; then coming in a variegated string across the street to our big dancing-room, decorated with evergreen and flowers, with a band in my father's study. Proud as I was of our place in the programme, prouder still I felt at the spectacle of my lovely young mother in “white swiss,” with bunches of scarlet geraniums in her curls and at her breast; wearing her pearls, my father's wedding-gift; with flushed cheeks and laughing eyes and lips, leading “down the middle,” with Mr. Philip Roman, in a Virginia reel! The supper at Mrs. Davidson's was, to my eyes, something too great and wonderful to be believed in. We and the Davidson children disgraced ourselves surreptitiously by eating impossible things, and when caught we were sent home with a swift rush and told to go straight to bed, arising next day none the worse for our indulgence. Since then, banquets in many lands have been set before us, but none could equal this! Lord Lytton, in his later days, said: “It's a long time since I've been hungry, but, thank God, I am still greedy”—a consolation in a very modest way.

One of the practices of Cumberland was for the male head of the house to go to market betimes in the morning, accompanied by a servant carrying a basket into which purchases were put. One of my keenest pleasures was when, at intervals, I was allowed to go there with my father. The dim spaces in the long building lit by swinging oil lanterns; the smiling, wheedling black faces behind piles of vegetables, meats, fowls, fruit, and eggs; the joy of nibbling radishes, of licking honey that oozed out of its receptacle, of receiving gifts of horse-cakes from friendly merchants, of struggling through the busy crowd at my father's coat-tails; I tried religiously not to prefer it to matins, but failed.

A vivid memory of my father is of an occasion when my busy mother, going off for one of her rare holiday jaunts to Berkeley Springs, and leaving her children and their nurse in his care, I awoke in the night crying for her and would not be consoled. No one heard me, no one answered, and I sprang out of bed and ran barefooted down the stairs. There, in the little study where he was accustomed to sit half the night (in an armchair I still possess), and make clippings from exchange journals for The Civilian, I beheld the editor buried in reading, snowed in with newspapers! At my timid note of alarm he looked up, frowned a little, then smiled tenderly, and, bounding up the steps, caught me in his arms, pressed me to his breast, carried me down to his den, and after a brief, delicious time of cosseting and soothing, carried me back to bed, and stayed by me, tender as any mother, till I slept!

With his death, our Cumberland home was broken up forever. My mother, with her three young children, was reclaimed by her own mother, who took the long journey from Alexandria to Cumberland to fetch us. It did not seem a hardship to go to live with dear Grandmamma Fairfax— sweetest and gentlest of mortals!

Once, in an outburst of infant rebellion against powers that were, I had conceived the idea of running away from Cumberland to take refuge with her. I had been told the canal passing through our town ran straight to her neighborhood, so I packed a preposterous little bundle, containing, among other necessaries, a tooth-brush, a prayer-book, and some lumps of sugar, and set out to walk down to the towing- path. A servant of ours, whom I always resented for the interruption to my very first adventure, espied, pursued, and captured me long before I reached the initial stage of my journey—the first lock of the canal.

Grandmamma was now a widow—the cold, stately old patriarch with silver locks and eyes of steely blue, whom I dimly recalled in earliest infancy, having gone to sleep with his grandfathers on the slope of a Virginian hill-side. He had been a wealthy man, as Virginian fortunes went, and to each of his sons—Albert, the eldest, grandfather of the present twelfth lord; Henry, of Ashgrove, a captain in the United States Volunteers, who died of exhaustion in marching through burning sun beside his soldiers in the war in Mexico, to encourage them; Orlando, the “beloved physician” of Alexandria and Richmond; and Reginald, then a lieutenant in the United States navy—he had given an estate, or its equivalent in money.

Vaucluse, the place in Fairfax County near the Theological Seminary of Virginia, had been left to the widow during her lifetime, to her son Reginald after her. And at Vaucluse our composite family lived until it was destroyed by the war between the States. When the dear châtelaine breathed her last there, our sailor uncle declared that everything must be kept as it was, to be a happy port for him at the end of his voyages. I was very much overawed by the continual remembrance of my dead grandpapa when first we reached Vaucluse. I did not dare tell any one how I was possessed by an image of him when I was three years old (seen through an accidentally opened door, lying in bed in the Long Room in the wing, whether ill or merely asleep I have no idea), but the picture of that stern ivory profile against the pillow, and the long locks like spun glass beside it, haunted me for years with shuddering. There was a flight of stairs leading past his door to my mother's room, up which I used to fly with fast-beating heart after nightfall. Also, I dreaded a long clock-case standing at the foot, which I associated with a story in a chapbook, told me by my nurse, about a corpse set on end in one of them.

My brother tells me there was a tale among the servants at Vaucluse, that my grandfather, once looking in his mirror in the Long Room, saw over his shoulder a negro woman standing, who gazed into his face appealingly. Recognizing her as a servant who had been sent away to Ashgrove, he turned to ask when she had come back and what she was doing there, and found—nobody! Two days later they heard that she had died at Ashgrove at that same hour.

Grandpapa Fairfax was a devout Swedenborgian and had his children baptized in that faith, some of them subsequently being rechristened in the Episcopal Church, by their own desire. It was said in Virginia that in early days he had covers laid at table for the departed members of his family, but for this I cannot vouch. In my time, every place at meals was filled by a very hungry set of material beings. In actual fact, the old gentleman was not so alarming as reputed.

Thomas, ninth Lord Fairfax, although singularly reserved in habit, was a vigorous personality. Son of the Hon. and Rev. Brian Fairfax (eighth lord and rector of old Christ Church in Alexandria, and life-long friend of Washington) and of Elizabeth Cary, of Ceelys, on the James, he had in boyhood made a journey to England with his Tory father in 1777, in order to make good before the House of Lords the claim of the latter to his title. In this then arduous expedition, made in raw winter weather, the father and son were assisted to pass through the lines of the American army by personal order of General Washington, who also assumed care of the wife and children left behind on the Virginian plantation. A tattered diary and letter written by little Sally Fairfax, during this time, were published by me in Scribner's Magazine for July, 1876, under the title of “A Little Centennial Lady.” All that I could hear or glean about this quaint and charming little great-aunt was delightful to me, and a certain phrase in the letter to her sire in London, which he was to “receive owing to the Generall's interposition” has passed into family quotation. “My love to my brother Tommy, with the hope that he will preserve the polite assurance and affable cheerfulness of a gentleman, yet not forgetting the incidents of Fairfax County.”

Of the diary I copy a few entries. Amid preparations for a Christmas dance at her father's house, Towlston, little housewife Sally writes: “On Thursday, mama made 6 mince pies and 7 custards, 12 tarts, 1 chicking pye and 4 pudings for the ball.”

“Miss Molly Page and Mr. Perce Baillie and Mr. William Page and Mr. William Sandford, Mr. Mody and Miss Jenny, a man who lives at Colchester, Mr. Hurst, Mrs. Hurst's husband, young Harry Gunnell, son of old William Gunnell, John Seal from the little falls, Mr. Watts and Mr. Hunter, (etc, etc, etc) these are all the gentlemen and ladies that were at the ball. Mrs. Gunnell brought her sucking child with her.”

“On Monday night, when papa was at Mount Vernon my aunt Fairfax” [Mrs. George William Fairfax, born Cary] “sent my muslin apron to him which she gave me when I was at Belvoir, but I did not bring it home with me, so she made Miss Polly work it for me, and in it she sent me a note, the apron is mighty pritty.”

“On Friday the 3rd, of Janna, came jon vane to undertake the building of the henhouse he got no incouragement so he went away the same way he came.”

“On Friday the 3 of Jan came here granny Carty, she cut me out a short gown, and stayed all night.”

“On Friday the 3 of Jan, papa went to Collo Washington's and came home again the next Wednesday which was the 8.”

“On Friday the 3 of Jan that vile man Adam at night kild a poor cat of rage because she eat a bit of meat out of his hand and scratched it. O vile reach of new negrows if he was mine I would cut him to pieces a son of a gun a vile negrow he should be kild himself by rites.”

“On Thursday the 2 of Jan Marjerry went to washing and brought all the things in ready done on the 9 of the same month I think she was a great wile about them a whole week if you will believe me reader.”

“On Friday the 10 of Jannuary in the morning came here Danny Govens overseer for Taff, and Taff went away accordingly poor Taff I pitty him indeed, reader.” “On Friday the 17 of Jan I mended Tommy's shirt from head to foot. S. F.”

“On Monday the 27 of Jan there fell an amazing snow two foot and a half deep, on Tuesday the 28 of Jan I craked a loaf of sugar, on Tuesday the 28, Adam cut down a cherry tree on Friday the 14 of Febberary, the red and white cow calved and had a red and white calf, 1772. S. FAIRFAX.”

We have, alas! no portrait of S. F. in the family gallery. My grandmother, Margaret Herbert, who afterward became brother Tommy's wife, remembered pretty Sally, at seventeen, at the Carlyle house in Alexandria, dressed for a birthright ball, to which General and Mrs. Washington were to take her. She was now engaged to “a young Mr. Washington,” cousin or nephew of the general's, and on this occasion the great Washington “devoted himself to her especially, leading off in a minuet with her, when they were the observed of all observers. Sally wore a dress of white net over white satin, the net trimmed with rose-colored satin leaves, a pink rose in her hair, with one white ostrich plume. It was the last ball she ever attended.” So poor, bright, quaint little Sally, “the general's” pet of all her family, was cut off on her virgin stalk, dying before her wedding-day.

We always heard that our grandpapa mourned for her to his long life's end.

Later in life, Thomas, Lord Fairfax, again went abroad to take possession of an inheritance coming to him from his aunt, Mrs. George William Fairfax, of Bath, England, born Sally Cary, the famous belle of Revolutionary times, around whom, with her two sisters, Mary, afterward Mrs. Ambler, and Elizabeth, wife of Brian Fairfax, cluster many a story, with variants, in the histories of the youthful Washington. She, with her Tory husband, finding life in the colony unendurable, had gone to live in England, passing on their voyage out the tea-laden ship that was to work havoc with king-craft in Boston harbor. Some of the silver now in daily use in my home, notably a pair of Corinthian column candlesticks with repoussé bases, was part of their table furniture. A full service of it had originally been brought to the colony by Colonel William Fairfax, of Belvoir, had voyaged back with Mr. and Mrs. George William Fairfax, was again transported to Virginia by my grandfather, used for years at Vaucluse, lay buried under the ruins of Vaucluse during the four years of war, and finally, exhumed intact, was distributed among the Fairfax heirs.

My grandmother, after the Southern custom, perhaps too often followed, was a cousin of her husband. As Margaret Herbert, of Alexandria, she had grown up in the old Carlyle house, with its heavy chimneys, dormer-windows, double balconies, and small-paned windows, now shown to tourists as the scene of Braddock's conference, in 1755, with the five governors of the colonies about the march to Fort Duquesne. The dwelling, in the temporary absence of the family, had been lent for the purpose by her grandfather, Major Carlyle, afterward quartermaster of the expedition, and his wife, Sarah Fairfax, of Belvoir. Traditions of this dwelling, coming to me from her, embody certain visits there “to dine and lie,” of General and Mrs. Washington on the occasion of birthright balls at the City Hotel, describe the toilets and trains worn by the ladies, Sister Nancy's collision with Aaron Burr on the stairway, when he put his hand on his heart with a bow and smile that (we youngsters thought) kept the lady forever unwed, and much of the same kind. The circumstance that I perhaps approved of most was that grandmamma was allowed to “come out” at fourteen!