peculiarities of well-known residents, characterized my father as

"Philosophic Ben,
Who, pointing to the stars, cries, Land ahead!"

His reserved, abstracted manner,--though his gravity concealed a
fund of rare humor,--kept us children somewhat aloof from him;
but my mother's temperament formed a complete contrast to his.
She was chatty and social, rosy-cheeked and dimpled, with bright
blue eyes and soft, dark, curling hair, which she kept pinned up
under her white lace cap-border. Not even the eldest child
remembered her without her cap, and when some of us asked her why
she never let her pretty curls be visible, she said,--
"Your father liked to see me in a cap. I put it on soon after we
were married, to please him; I always have worn it, and I always
shall wear it, for the same reason."

My mother had that sort of sunshiny nature which easily shifts to
shadow, like the atmosphere of an April day. Cheerfulness held
sway with her, except occasionally, when her domestic cares grew
too overwhelming; but her spirits rebounded quickly from
discouragement.

Her father was the only one of our grandparents who had survived
to my time,--of French descent, piquant, merry, exceedingly
polite, and very fond of us children, whom be was always treating
to raisins and peppermints and rules for good behavior. He had
been a soldier in the Revolutionary War,--the greatest
distinction we could imagine. And he was also the sexton of the
oldest church in town,--the Old South,--and had charge of the