[Illustration: PROFESSOR PHELPS'S HOUSE AT ANDOVER, MASSACHUSETTS, THE HOUSE IN WHICH ELIZABETH STUART PHELPS WAS REARED.] My mother, whose name I am proud to wear, was the eldest daughter of Professor Stuart, and inherited his intellectuality. At the time of her death she was at the first blossom of her very positive and widely-promising success as a writer of the simple home stories which took such a hold upon the popular heart. Her "Sunnyside" had already reached a circulation of one hundred thousand copies, and she was following it fast--too fast--by other books for which the critics and the publishers clamored. Her last book and her last baby came together, and killed her. She lived one of those rich and piteous lives such as only gifted women know; torn by the civil war of the dual nature which can be given to women only. It was as natural for her daughter to write as to breathe; but it was impossible for her daughter to forget that a woman of intellectual power could be the most successful of mothers. [Illustration: PROFESSOR AUSTIN PHELPS, FATHER OF ELIZABETH STUART PHELPS. From an early photograph.] "Everybody's mother is a remarkable woman," my father used to say when he read overdrawn memoirs indited by devout children; and yet I have sometimes felt as if even the generation that knows her not would feel a certain degree of interest in the tact and power by which this unusual woman achieved the difficult reconciliation between genius and domestic life. In our times and to our women such a problem is practical, indeed. One need not possess genius to understand it now. A career is enough. The author of "Sunnyside," "The Angel on the Right Shoulder," and "Peep at Number Five," lived before women had careers and public sympathy in them. Her nature was drawn against the grain of her times and of her circumstances; and where our feet find easy walking, hers were hedged. A child's memories go for something by way of tribute to the achievement of one of those rare women of the elder time whose gifts forced her out, but whose heart held her in. I can remember no time when I did not understand that my mother must write books because people would have and read them; but I cannot remember one hour in which her children needed her and did not find her. My first distinct vision of this kind of a mother gives her by the nursery lamp, reading to us her own stories, written for ourselves, never meant to go beyond that little public of two, and illustrated in colored crayons by her own pencil. For her gift in this direction was of an original quality, and had she not been a writer she must have achieved something as an artist. Perhaps it was to keep the standards up, and a little girl's filial adoration down, that these readings ended with some classic--Wordsworth, I remember most often--"We are Seven," or "Lucy Gray." [Illustration: ELM ARCH, ANDOVER, MASSACHUSETTS.]