Young Crawford was as full of fun as other boys of his age. With brother Harry he performed various antics at the house of my aunt, Mrs. Mailliard, in Bordentown, New Jersey. Her family were surprised, when walking in the garden, to see the stand of the lost rocking-horse protruding from the chimney! Dear old Mr. Joseph Greene Cogswell, who had been the first librarian of the Astor Library, was sitting quietly by the fire when boots suddenly came down the chimney. With perfect gravity he picked these out of the fire with the tongs, causing great amusement to the naughty boys watching above. Sister Julia was ten years older than Frank, but they were great chums. During one of our periodical stays at the Institution for the Blind they bought cream-cakes with the money given them for car fare, and walked the two or more miles from Boston to South Boston with cheerful hearts! During our residence in Boylston Place my father did some of his writing in the house and asked us to make no noise near his room. We were so young and thoughtless as to think this request unreasonable. True, we knew, in a general way, that he was writing the report for the Massachusetts Board of State Charities, but this meant little to us. In later years we came to understand what labor and fatigue the task involved, for the board was the pioneer body of its kind in the United States. My father’s wide experience made it inevitable that he should be summoned to sit on it. “The Nestor and Achilles of public charities in Massachusetts” soon became the chairman. In a series of annual reports he advocated a system of dealing with the dependent classes which was accepted and still remains in force, not only in Massachusetts, but in many other states and in some European countries. Public institutions, he declared, should be built only in the last resort. The dependent classes should be diffused through the community, not gathered together. Children should be cared for in families, not in institutions. Defectives should be brought together only for purposes of instruction. They should not live together in homes, as their peculiarities thus become more strongly developed, but with normal people. As a pioneer in eugenics he strongly disapproved of the policy of certain trustees of the Reform School for Girls. These wished to bury in oblivion the former bad life of the young women, allowing young men to marry them without any warning of their past misbehavior. My father knew this was all wrong and so declared, drawing upon himself sarcastic denunciations from the unwise trustees. When it was proposed to build a large institution at Winthrop, he wrote to the newspapers, showing the evil of congregating so many people under one roof. An unexpected ally appeared in a correspondent who wrote Doctor Howe, approving the stand he had taken “because, although it is not generally known, there are lions and tigers under the proposed site of the institution!”