"Mitter Ward" (to give him his nursery title) treasured these tokens of pious and literary promise. He even responded in kind, as is shown by some verses which are endorsed:-- "From my dearest Father. JULIA EUPHROSYNE WARD [_sic_]." His letters are full of playful affection. He would fain be father and mother both to the children who were now his all. Under the austere exterior lay a tenderness which perhaps they hardly comprehended at the time. It was in fact this very anguish of solicitude, this passionate wish that they should not only have, but be everything desirable and lovely, that made him outwardly so stern. This sterner note impressed itself so deeply upon the minds of his children that the anecdotes familiar to our own generation echo it. We see the little Julia, weary with long riding in the family coach, suffering her knees to drop apart childwise, and we hear Mr. Ward say: "My daughter, if you cannot sit like a lady, we will stop at the next tailor's and have you measured for a pair of pantaloons!" Or we hear the child at table, remarking innocently that the cheese is strong; and the deep voice replying, "It is no more so than the expression, Miss!" The family was still at 16 Bond Street, when all the children had whooping-cough severely, and were confined to the house for many weeks. Mrs. Mailliard writes of this time:-- "I remember the screened-off corner of the dining-room, which was called the Bower, where we each retired when the spasms came on, and the promises which we vainly gave each other each morning to choke rather than cough whilst Uncle Doctor made his visit to the nursery; for the slightest sound from one of us provoked the general order of a dose all round." It was after this illness that Julia Ward first went to Newport. A change of air was prescribed for the children, and they were packed off to the farmhouse of Jacob Bailey, two or three miles from the town of Newport. Here they spent a happy summer, to be followed by many others. They slept on mattresses stuffed with ground corncobs; the table was primitive; but there was plenty of cream and curds, eggs and butter, and there was the wonderful air. The children grew fat and hearty, and scampered all over the island with great delight. (But when they went down to the beach, Julia must wear a thick green worsted veil to preserve her ivory-and-rose complexion. "Little Julia has another freckle to-day!" a visitor was told. "It was not her fault, the nurse forgot her veil!") Julia recalled Newport in 1832 as "a forsaken, mildewed place, a sort of intensified Salem, with houses of rich design, no longer richly inhabited." She was to watch through many years the growth of what was always one of the cities of her heart.