My boy! My baby! Just four years old, on my last birthday! The man-child, of whom I was wont to say proudly that he was the handsomest birthday gift I ever had, and that no young man could ever pay his mother a more delicate and gracious compliment than he had paid me in timing his advent upon December 21st. The baby that had Alice’s eyes and brunette coloring! I lay still, staring up at the ceiling, and doing the fastest thinking I had ever accomplished. I saw the motherless boy, sensitive and high-spirited, affectionate and clever, the butt of rude lads, and misinterpreted by brutish teachers; exposed to fiery temptations at school and in college, and yielding to them for the lack of a mother’s training and the ægis of a mother’s love. “The boy will go to the devil without his mother!” Hard words those, and curtly uttered, but they struck home as coaxings and arguments and pettings could not have done. In half an hour my husband looked in upon me again. I intercepted remark or query by saying: “Will you ring the bell for Rose to help me dress? I have made up my mind to hold on for a while longer.” The tactful ruse had given me a new lease of life. One more circumstance connected with our first foreign trip may be worth mentioning here. During the summer of 1855, which I spent in Boston and the vicinity, I consulted Ossian Ashley with regard to a project that had engaged my mind for some months—_viz._, indulging my long-cherished desire to visit Europe, and to spend a year there. There was no reason, that I could see, why I should wait longer to put the plan into execution. My parents were living, and were in the prime of healthy maturity; I had plenty of money of my own, and, if I had not, my father would cheerfully defray the expenses of the trip. We discussed the scheme at length, and with growing zest. Then he made the proposition that his wife should accompany me, taking her boy and girl along (she had but two children then), and that he would join us in time to journey with us for a few months, and bring us home. With this well-digested scheme in my mind, I returned to Richmond. There I met with strenuous opposition from an unexpected quarter: “If you will stay at home and marry me, I guarantee to take you abroad within seven years,” was one of the few promises the speaker ever broke to me. Just twenty-one years from the day in which Ossian Ashley and I blocked out the route his wife and I would take on the other side, I looked into his New York office to say that we had engaged passage for Liverpool for October 15th, and that we expected to be absent for two years at the least. His look was something to be remembered. His son was in a Berlin University, and Mrs. Ashley and her two young daughters would sail on September 15th for Liverpool, intending to go thence to Germany. They would remain there for two years.