Many years later Father’s health again seemed precarious--dizziness, and numbness of the arms, caused the physician to prophesy approaching paralysis. I remember this as my first sorrow. I was perhaps fourteen years old. When Mother told me what the Doctor had said I flung myself on the bed in a paroxysm of grief. My Father was going to leave me! The utter helplessness and wretchedness of us all without him! It was an hour of agony. But there stood Mother with her own grief, and mine. This calmed me. I must help and comfort her, instead of giving way like this. The storm passed; but the days, weeks, and months that followed were shadowed by this dread, which, however, proved less well-founded than it had seemed; or else Father’s change in his mode of life effected a decided change in his condition. Closing out his boot-and-shoe store, and travelling again for the same firm for which he had travelled as a young man, he recuperated markedly. Now, in his seventy-second year, he is in fair health, alert, enduring, and with keen intellectual vigour--a man of undaunted courage and unconquerable optimism. I have often wondered how it would seem to have more than one brother and sister; it always seems as if all the love I have went to these two, and that there would have been none left for others; or at least that it would have had to be divided up, leaving each the poorer--one does not have to divide for brother and sister--the love you give a sister is peculiarly hers, the love to a brother peculiarly his, but how is it that large families have enough to go around? Death has never come nearer to me than when my grandparents were taken. Not unmindful of this escape, I think of it often now. Once I thought, “Death can never take away my father and mother, my sister and brother,” but of late I am losing the feeling that none of the calamities of life can come nigh me; and, instead, find myself trying to think what it would be like to live on if one of them were taken. Once when Brother was a lad of perhaps twelve, during an attack of inflammatory rheumatism, his heart acted so badly that Sister and I were sent for in great haste to come home from school. The attack passed, but after that illness his disposition was altered; he was more irritable, with a temper much like Grandpa’s. He would domineer over us, as big brothers will, speaking sharply over trifles, and he and Sister would quarrel. I did not quarrel, but would grieve over his harsh tones. I never could endure angry tones, they always made me shudder. Noting this susceptibility, Brother was more patient with me than with Sister, who would get miffed easily and talk back. My tears, which came easily in those days, always melted him. Consciously or unconsciously, I ruled him to some extent by this weakness.