My ancestors were the Pilgrims, that first group of adventurers who embarked upon the _Mayflower_ in search of a far-off land where they might worship in peace. They had not the qualities of the Puritans who came later. The Pilgrims were the impractical dreamers, and in one year were lectured by their backers because they spent too much time in prayer and too little in trade. The blood of nineteen different people who made that voyage flows in my veins and, try as hard as I may, I have never been able to find that this pure English lineage had been broken during the first hundred years in America and certainly not for centuries before that in the old country. From them has come to me a want of deference, bred in them by a hatred of kings; a lack of rhythm—the nasal twang began by a desire to ridicule the Mother Church and ended by becoming a virtue; and an intense hatred of restraint in any form. From my father I must have received whatever artistic leanings I possess, although I believe them to be only a form of Yankee handicraftsman-ship. He was a better carpenter than a preacher, and his sketch book is filled with careful copies of many old masters which he saw abroad. I owe a deep debt to some one for curbing his imagination in one instance, however, for he wrote to an intimate friend on the day of my birth: “I have waited to reply to your letter that I might announce the name we had chosen for the bouncing boy whose voice I can now hear upstairs. But, since this year they have seen fit to take from us Daniel Webster and the Duke of Wellington, I think I shall name him Duke Webster.” My father died before I was old enough to know him, but I got quite a vivid picture of his side of the family from a distant relative whom I met by accident one day. He said: “The Simmonses have always been a long-legged set of lazy galoots. We have had great success with the other sex. We have been able to do one thing a little better than other folks and stick to it until we have about a thousand dollars—then we sit down and loaf until it is gone.” Mother was different. When she was a girl she had a serious talk with her dad, telling him it was foolish for her to study piano or music of any kind. “What is your ambition?” he asked.