How many hours I have spent down in her cool sweet cellar over the little red churn, the dasher going up and down, up and down, while I said aloud my favourite poems--after Grandma had gone upstairs. Many a pat of butter has gathered under the dasher while I rehearsed the winning of Juliet, Othello’s speech to the senate, Portia’s speech to Shylock--extracts from Cathcart’s Literary Reader, which was my first introduction to real literature. Men do not gather grapes from thorns, or figs from thistles. As Grandma’s life had been one of service, so her daughter, my mother, was untiring in devotion to her mother; and so, too, I am glad to say, Mother’s children have tried to emulate the filial examples set them. By way of contrast I am reminded of a story illustrating hereditary tendencies: A boy was arrested for beating his father; the injured father defended his boy thus, “He can’t help beating me: I beat my father; my father beat his father; and my son’s son will beat him--it runs in our family.” I am glad it runs in our family to love and revere our parents. Yet, there was Grandpa with his habit of profanity, the son of a Baptist clergyman! Mother used to marvel how he could have grown up that way, since his father, who used to take boys to tutor in his own home, was said to have given him and them a very strict up-bringing. His mother, Katrina Klincke, born in Alsace, was an inexorable housekeeper. Her exacting ways have cropped out in full force in one of our aunts; and in later years I’m not sure but this great-grandmother wields an influence over my sister and me--we cannot be comfortable in disorder or slack housekeeping, nor--more’s the pity!--can we let any one else be. My paternal ancestry is French and, probably, Scottish. Father used to say we were descended on his father’s side from one of the celebrated French Revolutionists, an intimate of Napoleon’s and Josephine’s; but my grandparents and great-grandparents were born in the Land of the Drumlins. When, some years ago, the memoirs of our reputed French ancestor were published, bringing to light his brilliant but unscrupulous career, I took a mischievous pleasure in sending Father the particularly scathing comments concerning “our ancestor.”