Uncle Richard was very much interested in genealogy and took great pride in his ancestors. He informed me that the boys at school looked with respect on his brothers and himself because they were descended from four Governors! Dear deluded man! How could he so misunderstand boy nature! I’ve no doubt their schoolmates treated the brothers with due respect, the Wards being a large and powerful race. It is more prudent not to offend bigger boys. He was showing me one day an old family Bible in which the names of seven generations of Wards were inscribed. Seeing a visitor come up the front steps, he closed the book. “Now, my dear, we will not talk about ancestors before Mr. So-and-so,” he observed. “Because if we speak of these before other people, they also talk about theirs, _and that is not so interesting_!” I do not think he wrote any account of his forebears, leaving that for his successor in the cult, Cousin John Ward. The latter does not mention the fourth awe-inspiring Governor, but perhaps he was on the distaff side. William Dean Howells was one of the noted people who came to see us in Boylston Place. Sister Julia and I fancied that he looked like an amiable Richard III. His black hair was parted in the middle—a thing not usual in the ’Sixties. Although cut short, it strayed over his forehead in a way to suggest the close-cropped hair of the medieval knight, while his dark complexion, short, compact figure, and something unusual about his face, suggested this resemblance to us. The comparison was not invidious, because we admired Edwin Booth in the rôle of Richard III. We were interested in Mr. Howells’s india-rubbers, they were so small! Mr. and Mrs. Frank Leslie, with Mrs. Squiers, also spent an evening with us. Both ladies were in full evening dress, doubtless supposing the occasion would be a formal one. Mrs. Squiers was a striking-looking person whose face did not recommend itself to me. After the death of the first wife, she became the second Mrs. Frank Leslie. All suffragists owe her a debt of gratitude for her generous gift of her fortune to our cause. One of our delightful visitors in these days was our cousin-german Frank, known later as Marion Crawford, the novelist. He was sent to this country to receive his early education, spending several years at St. Paul’s School in Concord, New Hampshire. He was now about ten years old, a handsome, freshfaced boy, very much interested in locomotives. He brought a number of engravings of these, which I politely examined, in spite of my perfect indifference to engines of all sorts. In later years my youngest son, discovering with pain this trait in his mother’s character, observed, reflectively: “It must be strange not to be interested in locomotives.” “No, Jack, it is _not_ strange at all!”