I was soon to learn that tragedy did not come always from a mysterious beyond. What a chain of catastrophes it took to teach the men and women who were developing the new industry the constant risk they ran in handling either crude or refined oil. They came to our very door, when a neighboring woman hurrying to build a fire in her cookstove poured oil on the wood before she had made sure there were no live coals in the firebox. An awful explosion occurred and she and two women who ran to her assistance were burned to a crisp. I heard horrified whisperings about me. The refusal to tell me what had happened aroused a terrible curiosity. I gathered that the bodies were laid out in a house not far away and, when nobody was looking, stole in to look at them. Broken sleep for me for nights. The mystery of death finally came into our household. There had been a fourth child born in the house on the hill—“little Frankie,” we always called him—blue-eyed like my father, the sunniest of us all. For weeks one season he lay in the parlor fighting for life—scarlet fever—a disease more dreaded by mothers in those days than even smallpox. Daily I stood helpless, agonized, outside the door behind which little Frankie lay screaming and fighting the doctor. I remember even today how long the white marks lasted on the knuckles of my hands after the agony behind the closed door had died down and my clenched fists relaxed. Little Frankie died, became a pathetic and beloved tradition in the household. My little sister, who had made a terrible and successful fight against the disease, told me how she could not understand why father and mother cried when they talked of Frankie. “If they want to see him,” she thought, “why do they not put a ladder from the top of the hill up to the sky into heaven and climb up? If Frankie is there God would let them see him.” I have said that my first recollection of Lincoln was the impression made by the tragedy of his death. That this was so was not for the lack of material on him in our household. My father was an ardent Republican. Back in ’56 he had written from his river trip, “Hurrah for Frémont and Dayton.” As soon as he had had more money than the actual needs of the family required, he had subscribed to _Harper’s Weekly_, _Harper’s Monthly_, the New York _Tribune_, began to buy books. Of all of these I remember only the _Weekly_ and _Monthly_. My brother and I used to lie by the hour flat on our stomachs, heels in the air, turning over the exciting pages of the War numbers; but none of it went behind my eyes—none concerned me. Only now when I go back to the files of those old papers there is a whispering of something once familiar.