Mother was then a school-teacher, Father a dry-goods clerk. Both were born in log houses; both reared in the frugal way of their times; the snow often blew in on their coverlids through chinks in the logs; they slept in trundle beds; wore homespun clothes and calf-skin shoes, and had their education at the district schools to which they walked through the woods following marked trees. Born amid the drumlins less than fifty miles apart, all their married lives--more than fifty years together--have been spent in the little village where they met. In the early years of their marriage Father had a travelling wagon called a “Yankee Notion and Boot and Shoe Store.” Brother, several years my senior, would tell with pride of Papa’s big wagon and the iron-gray horses. In girlhood I spent hours upstairs, when supposed to be putting the large closet to rights at the spring housecleaning, sitting on the floor poring over Father’s letters to Mother, written during those years. How like a romance to find those letters so full of solicitude and love!--comments on Brother’s baby ways; admonitions to the adopted brother; words of love to Mother--strange to get this glimpse of my parents; to see the young father’s pride in his boy; and to read these unrestrained expressions of devotion! For the father I knew, though affectionate and kind, was a more staid, reserved person than the one in the letters. Now the baby boy was grown up, the adopted brother scarcely a memory, and the girl who was not born when the letters were written was reading eagerly the ardent words that had gladdened her mother’s young heart! The circumstances of my brother’s birth strongly appealed to my imagination: My parents had given up hopes of a child some years before he came. Father’s health had long been precarious--a persistent cough and exhausting night sweats were wasting him rapidly. Mother, at his side day and night, facing his approaching death, was facing a hidden dread as well--the fear that she was now to become a mother. As the weeks passed and the fear became a certainty, she determined to spare Father the knowledge, thinking it would kill him outright. She almost prayed for his release before the truth must be apparent. How she dreaded the scrutiny of the Doctor, and Father’s questioning eyes! How she resorted to evasion, artifice, and concealment! But one day, suddenly changing her mind, trusting in God to help him bear it, she told Father that the child they had hoped for so long was actually to come. Instantly he became electrified with the glad tidings. Summoning unknown funds of strength he cried, “I must live, _I will live_!” It was a greatly improved patient that the Doctor found the next day, and recovery, though slow, dated from that time. (It was probably arrested tuberculosis.)