Then, as always, she could trust herself freely in speech, for she never spoke without fresh adaptation to the occasion, and her fortunate memory for words and names is unimpaired at ninety. Since I am here engaged upon a mere sketch of Mrs. Howe, not a formal memoir, I have felt free to postpone until this time the details of her birth and parentage. She was the daughter of Samuel and Julia Rush (Cutler) Ward, and was born at the house of her parents in the Bowling Green, New York city, on May 27, 1819. She was married on April 14, 1843, at nearly twenty-four years of age, to Dr. Samuel Gridley Howe, whom she had met on visits to Boston. They soon went to Europe,—the first of many similar voyages,—where her eldest daughter, Julia Romana, was born during the next spring. This daughter was the author of a volume of poems entitled “Stray Clouds,” and of a description of the Summer School of Philosophy at Concord entitled “Philosophiæ Quæstor,” and was the founder of a metaphysical club of which she was president. She became the wife of the late Michael Anagnos, of Greek origin, her father’s successor in charge of the Institution for the Blind, and the news of her early death was received with general sorrow. Mrs. Howe’s second daughter was named Florence Marion, became in 1871 the wife of David Prescott Hall, of the New York Bar, and was author of “Social Customs” and “The Correct Thing,” being also a frequent speaker before the women’s clubs. Mrs. Howe’s third daughter, Mrs. Laura E. Richards, was married in the same year to Henry Richards, of Gardiner, Maine, a town named for the family of Mr. Richards’s mother, who established there a once famous school, the Gardiner Lyceum. The younger Mrs. Richards is author of “Captain January” and other stories of very wide circulation, written primarily for her own children, and culminating in a set of nonsense books of irresistible humor illustrated by herself. Mrs. Howe’s youngest daughter, Maud, distinguished for her beauty and social attractiveness, is the wife of Mr. John Elliott, an English artist, and has lived much in Italy, where she has written various books of art and literature, of which “Atalanta in the South” was the first and “Roma Beata” one of the last. Mrs. Howe’s only son, Henry Marion, graduated at Harvard University in 1869 and from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1871, is a mining engineer and expert, and is a professor in the School of Mines at Columbia University. His book on “The Metallurgy of Steel” has won for him a high reputation. It will thus be seen that Mrs. Howe has had the rare and perhaps unequaled experience of being not merely herself an author, but the mother of five children, all authors. She has many grandchildren, and even a great-grandchild, whose future career can hardly be surmised.