My father was the fifth child in a family of ten; his father died in early adult life, presumably of tuberculosis, though Father would never admit it. Two of his sisters had the same disease, and, because of my resemblance to one of them, and my not robust health in childhood, I was something of an object of solicitude in early girlhood, though all fears on that score vanished long ago. I have heard that my paternal grandfather drank to excess, and know that one of his sons did, which may largely account for my father’s life-long zeal for the Temperance Cause. His mother, of Scottish descent, left with a large family, was brave, strong, and resourceful to an unusual degree. Their little log-house being miles away from a neighbour, once during a big snow-storm lasting several days they had nothing in the house to eat but potatoes and salt. “But we ate them and were glad to get them,” said Father, who added, “We can never know how much inward anxiety Mother felt at such times, but whatever it was, none but herself ever knew.” We children called her “the other Grandma,” for she then lived “way out West” (in Michigan), and we never saw her but once. I remember her serious face, which could look very merry when she smiled; and her black gown with a purple stripe running through it. She was at our house on one of my early birthdays and helped us smoke glass to look at a total eclipse of the sun. When she died, a cousin came running down the hill waving a yellow paper and saying breathlessly, “Grandma is dead!” _And she smiled when she said it!_ A sensitive girl, overcome with the importance of being the bearer of such news, her smile, I know now, was a purely nervous manifestation; but I could not judge her leniently then. Moved by the grief of my parents, I wept to see them weep, but the shadow passed quickly; not so the resentment I held toward that cousin for her untimely smile. As youth passes one longs for fuller knowledge of the lives that preceded one’s own. We are the result of all that has gone before, but how often important figures are missing; and even when not, how inexplicable the sum total is! Lives cut off in our childhood and youth, or perhaps before we were born, may have endowed us with this or that constitutional bias, this weakness, that strength--to which of them do I owe this fault?--is this trait, for which I am commended, my own, or my great grandmother’s?--insoluble complexities, yet how we seek an answer, here and there, as we study our tree of life from the roots up! CHAPTER II THE ROOF-TREE If my father had married a certain sweetheart of his early youth, and Mother a suitor to whom she almost became engaged, what would have become of me? Should I be I, or would it be One-tenth another to nine-tenths me? I often asked myself this question. But after each of my parents had had a preliminary romance, they met at a Methodist prayer-meeting, and each knew from the start what the outcome would be.