Grandpa, as I have said, was impatient and irascible; he was easily moved to profanity; but he was a man of probity of life and character and a hater of shams. His sense of humour was keen, also his sense of justice. He was a mason by trade; had built the brick church in the town, the old Academy, and a few other fine old brick buildings standing there to-day. I used to look upon these with pride, saying to myself, “Grandpa built that--and that”; though, since my earliest recollection, he had not worked at his trade. He led an active life up to his eighty-sixth year about his village farm, with his cows and his pigs, and his haying in the low-lying meadows. I can see him now riding his black horse, straight and sturdy, on his way to the pasture with the cows. Often they were wayward and the boys in the street would annoy him. I used to feel chagrined beyond words when I heard him swearing at the cows, or at the boys, and saw him brandishing his whip in the air. Mother felt the same. I could detect a look of relief on her face those days when Grandpa rode peaceably by with the cows. Grandma was not pious, she was a saint. Though a church member, she seldom went to church. Toiling from morning till night, she endured hardship, harshness, and pain with a sweet reasonableness that endeared her to all. Grandpa’s impatience and shouting never provoked complaints from her. She seemed to think his quick temper and deafness excused him. In contrast to her hard workaday life I was always dreaming of the romance of Grandma’s early days. Filling in related facts with fancies, I pored over her early picture with its quaint arrangement of gown and hair, rejoicing in traces of her girlish beauty. I liked her quaint name, Eunice (a cousin of hers, a courtly old gentleman, used to call her Eu-ni’-ce--that was beautiful, but Grandpa uncompromisingly pronounced it Eu’-nis); I liked the names of her sisters, too--Thankful, Peace, and Nancy. In retrospect I mourned with my great-grandfather Albro when he lost his young wife and had to scatter his baby girls among their relatives. Near neighbours, John Gear and wife, had begged for little Eunice, then less than two years old. Though he let them take her, he had refused their repeated requests to adopt her. But one morning the neighbours were astonished to find the Gear house dismantled and deserted, the couple having stolen away in the night. They were bound to have that child. No trace of them could be obtained. That was in 1813. They easily escaped detection, though for years the poor father inquired diligently of chance strangers and travellers for news of the fugitives. The Gears journeyed to a distant county. Eunice was reared in ignorance of her real parentage. Even when she married, her foster parents were loth to let her leave them. Her own home and children soon claimed all her thoughts, and she lived on unaware of the tragedy in the life of her father.