I have always kept her picture beside me. I have always been bound to
her by a tender and mystical love. During all the years of my life my
feeling for her could not have been more intense and personal if I had
had the experience of daily association with her through boyhood and
youth.

What girlish wistfulness and sadness there are in her eyes! What a
gentle smile is upon her lips, as if she would deny the deep foreboding
of a spirit that peered into a perilous future! Her dark hair falls in
rich strands over her forehead in an elfin and elegant disorder. Her
slender throat rises gracefully from an unloosened collar. This picture
was made from a drawing done by a friend of my father's four months
before I was born. My old nurse told me that he was invalided from the
war; that my father had asked him to make the drawing upon his return to
London. Perhaps my father had ominous dreams of her ordeal soon to be.

They pronounced me a fine boy. I was round faced, round bodied, well
nourished. The nurse read my horoscope in coffee grounds. I was to
become a notable figure in the world. My mother's people took me in
charge, glad to give me a place in their household. Here I was when my
father returned from the war, six months later. He had been wounded in
the battle of Waterloo. He was still weak and ill. I was told these
things by my grandmother in the succeeding years.

When I was four years old my father emigrated to America. I seem to
remember him. I have asked my grandmother if he did not sing "Annie
Laurie"; if he did not dance and fling me toward the ceiling in a riot
of playfulness; if he did not snuggle me under my tender chin and tickle
me with his mustaches. She confirmed these seemingly recollected
episodes. But of his face I have no memory. There is no picture of him.