Maryland blood. Charles Francis, half Marylander by birth, had
hardly seen Boston till he was ten years old, when his parents
left him there at school in 1817, and he never forgot the
experience. He was to be nearly as old as his mother had been in
1845, before he quite accepted Boston, or Boston quite accepted
him.

A boy who began his education in these surroundings, with
physical strength inferior to that of his brothers, and with a
certain delicacy of mind and bone, ought rightly to have felt at
home in the eighteenth century and should, in proper
self-respect, have rebelled against the standards of the
nineteenth. The atmosphere of his first ten years must have been
very like that of his grandfather at the same age, from 1767 till
1776, barring the battle of Bunker Hill, and even as late as
1846, the battle of Bunker Hill remained actual. The tone of
Boston society was colonial. The true Bostonian always knelt in
self-abasement before the majesty of English standards; far from
concealing it as a weakness, he was proud of it as his strength.
The eighteenth century ruled society long after 1850. Perhaps the
boy began to shake it off rather earlier than most of his mates.

Indeed this prehistoric stage of education ended rather
abruptly with his tenth year. One winter morning he was conscious
of a certain confusion in the house in Mount Vernon Street, and
gathered, from such words as he could catch, that the President,
who happened to be then staying there, on his way to Washington,
had fallen and hurt himself. Then he heard the word paralysis.
After that day he came to associate the word with the figure of
his grandfather, in a tall-backed, invalid armchair, on one side