Our wedding anniversary came while we were getting settled and my present to Zulime that year was a set of silver which I had purchased with the check for an article called "A Pioneer Wife"--the paper which I had written as a memorial to my mother. In explanation of the fact that all these silver pieces bore the initials I. G., I said, "You are to think of them as a gift from my mother. Imagine that I gave them to her long ago, and that they now come to you, from her, as heirlooms. Let us call them 'The family silver' and hand them down to Mary Isabel in her turn." Zulime, who always rose to a sentiment of this kind, gratefully accepted this vicarious inheritance and thereafter I was pleased to observe that whenever Mary Isabel wished to break a plate she invariably reached for one of her grandmother's solid silver spoons--they were so much more effective than the plated ones! Christmas came to us this year with new and tender significance, for "Santy Claus" (who found us at home in New York, rejoicing in our first baby) brought to us our first tree, and the conjunction of these happy events produced in my wife almost perfect happiness. Furthermore, Mary Isabel achieved her first laugh. I am sure of this fact, for I put it down in my notebook, with these words, "She has a lovely smile and a chuckle like her grandmother's. She robs us of solitude, and system, and order, but our world would now be desolate without her." Only when I thought of what her grandfather was missing did I have a sense of regret. At our feast our daughter sat in the high chair which Katherine Herne had given her, and looked upon the tiny, decorated tree with eyes of rapture, deep, dark-blue eyes in which a seraphic light shone. Her life was beginning far, very far, from the bleak prairie lands in which her Daddy's winter holidays had been spent, and while the silver spoon in her mouth was not of my giving, the one with which she bruised her chair-arm, was veritably one of my rewards. In order to continue my practice as an Author, I managed to sandwich the writing of an occasional article between spells of minding the baby--and working on club committees. I recall going to Princeton to tell Henry Van Dyke's Club about "The Joys of the Trail," and it pleased me to be introduced as a "Representative of the West." West Point received me in this capacity, and I also read at one of Lounsbury's "Smokers" at Yale, but I was kept from any undue self-congratulation by recognition of the fact that my income was still considerably below the standard of a railway engineer--as perhaps it should be. My "arriving" was always in an accommodation train fifty minutes late.