The problem for my father now was to earn money to take us back to Iowa, for my mother to continue her patient waiting. For a dozen years before her marriage she had taught in district schools in Erie County, as well as in a private school of an aunt in Poughkeepsie, New York. She was a good teacher, but she was married! She must stay with her family then until her husband had a home ready for her; so ruled my grandmother, chock-full as she was of the best and severest New England rules for training girls to be ladies. You might live in a log house. You were reminded loftily that many of the “best families” had done that while “settling the country,” but you must “never forget who you are!” “Remember that your father is a McCullough of an ancient and honored Scotch clan, his mother a Raleigh of Sir Walter’s family, that I am a Seabury, my great-uncle the first Episcopal Bishop in the United States, my mother a Welles, her father on Washington’s staff.” It was a litany her four daughters all had to learn! Exciting employment waited my father. For six or seven years before his marriage, when he was earning his way through the Academy of Jamestown, New York, he spent his summers running a fleet of three or more flatboats of merchandise to be delivered at trading points on the Allegheny and the Ohio River—always as far south as Louisville, sometimes even up the Mississippi. “Captain Tarbell,” his small and jolly crew called him. The River was the chief highway of a great country. To its waters came the pioneer and trader, the teacher, the preacher, the scientist, the prophet, as well as every species of gambler, charlatan, speculator, swindler, cutthroat. My father’s stories of what he saw were among the joys of my childhood: a great fleet of steamboats burning at Pittsburgh, a hanging, river churches and preachers and show boats, children who never knew other homes than a boat, towns, cities, and what he loved best of all—nights floating quietly down the great Ohio, the moon above. Not strange that after those cruel months of working his way back to us he should have seized this opportunity again to take charge of his Jamestown friend’s river enterprise.