Although the hands of this woman strongly appealed to me by their beauty and delicacy, my mother’s appealed more powerfully--the whole woman in her seems typified in her hands. Not small, nor especially white, they are well-formed, and, in spite of a life filled with work, are soft, yet firm, strong, capable, and tender. Even as a child I seemed aware of her emotion, as well as her strength, in them. I used to like to clasp them--such a warm, sustaining grasp! And I liked to open them and look at the palms. She has a hollow palm (something like my own), and all the mounds are full and elastic--a warm, soft, brooding handclasp peculiarly her own. In my emotional nature I am more like Mother, in mental make-up more like Father. Sister’s hands are more like Father’s, yet her physical type in general, and her mental, is more like Mother’s. From Mother she and Brother get their fairer skin, while mine is the brunette shade, like Father’s. How mysterious it all is! How complex!--“Mate and make beget such different issues!” CHAPTER IV IN THE OLD PATHS Does one ever outgrow one’s early religious training? Though he outgrow his credulity, his faith, his observance of rite and ceremony, and though he wander far from the paths he followed when being trained “in the way he should go,” still must the religious influences shed round him in those early, plastic years have their permanent bearing upon his after life, even though sometimes so transformed as to be traceable only to the keen student of personality. “Back to the Old Paths” was a gospel hymn I heard in the days when those paths were traversed by my childish feet; and back to the old paths I now turn, seeking to retrace the steps which time and disuse have almost obliterated. Being Methodists, we children had been baptized in infancy, and our childhood and youth had been divided into three-year periods, diminutive dynasties, marked by the reigns of the different ministers, events being referred to as “during Brother Gregg’s stay,” “in Brother Carrier’s time,” “when Brother Browne was here.” What excitement toward the close of one of those “dynasties” to see what the new minister would be like!