In Tuscaloosa there resided, besides my Aunt Collier, few of my father’s and mother’s kin, and by a natural affinity I fell under the guardianship of my father’s brother, Thomas B. Tunstall, Secretary of State of Alabama. He was a bachelor; but all that I lacked in my separation from my father my uncle supplied, feeding the finer sides of my nature, and inspiring in me a love of things literary even at an age when I had scarce handled a book. My uncle’s influence began with my earliest days in Alabama. My aunt, Mrs. Collier, was delicate, Mrs. Battle domestic; Uncle Battle was a famous business man; and Uncle Collier was immersed in law and increasing political interests; but my memory crowds with pictures of my Uncle Tom, walking slowly up and down, playing his violin, and interspersing his numbers with some wise counsel to the child beside him. He taught me orally of poetry, and music, of letters and philosophy, and of the great world’s great interests. He early instilled in me a pride of family, while reading to me Scott’s fine tribute to Brian Tunstall, “the stainless knight,” or, as he rehearsed stories of Sir Cuthbert Tunstall, Knight of the Garter, and Bishop of London in the time of gentle Queen Anne; and it was in good Uncle Tom’s and my father’s company that the fascinations of the drama were first revealed to me. While I was yet a schoolgirl, and so green that, had I not been protected by these two loving guardians, I would have been eaten up by the cows on the Mobile meadows, I was taken to see “The Gamester,” in which Charles Kean and Ellen Tree were playing. It was a remarkable and ever-remembered experience. As the play proceeded, I became so absorbed in the story, so real and so thrillingly portrayed, that from silent weeping I took to sniffling and from sniffling to ill-repressed sobbing. I leaned forward in my seat tensely, keeping my eyes upon the stage, and equally oblivious of my father and uncle and the strangers who were gazing at me on every side. Now and then, as I sopped the briny outflow of my grief, realising in some mechanical manner that my handkerchief was wet, I would take it by two corners and wave it back and forth in an effort to dry it; but all the while the tears gushed from my eyes in rivulets. My guardians saw little of the play that night, for the amusement I afforded these experienced theatre-goers altogether exceeded in interest the mimic tragedy that so enthralled me.