expressed to Mrs. Payson his fear lest it might some day prove a real
misfortune to the child. "She will be in danger of marrying a blind man,
or a helpless cripple, out of pure sympathy," he once said.

But by far the strongest of all the impressions of her childhood related
to her father. His presence was to her the happiest spot on earth, and
any special expression of his affection would throw her into an ecstasy
of delight. When he was away she pined for his return. "The children
all send a great deal of love, and Elizabeth says, Do tell Papa to
come home," wrote her mother to him, when she was six years old. Her
recollections of her father were singularly vivid. She could describe
minutely his domestic habits, how he looked and talked as he sat by the
fireside or at the table, his delight in and skillful use of carpenters'
tools, his ingenious devices for amusing her and diverting his own
weariness as he lay sick in bed, _e.g._, tearing up sheets of white
paper into tiny bits, and then letting her pour them out of the
window to "make believe it snowed," or counting all the bristles in a
clothes-brush, and then as she came in from school, holding it up and
bidding her guess their number--his coolness and efficiency in the wild
excitements of a conflagration, the calm deliberation with which he
walked past the horror-stricken lookers on and cut the rope by which
a suicide was suspended; these and other incidents she would recall a
third of a century after his death, as if she had just heard of or just
witnessed them. To her child's imagination his memory seemed to be
invested with the triple halo of father, hero, and saint. A little
picture of him was always near her. She never mentioned his name without
tender affection and reverence. Nor is this at all strange. She was
almost nine years old when he died; and his influence, during these
years, penetrated to her inmost being. She once said that of her
father's virtues one only--punctuality--had descended to her. But here