The amateurs continuing hopelessly coy, we had, in a moment of desperation, an interview with the manager of an opera troupe. It did not prove practicable, however, to hand the concert over to professionals. We were obliged to call in the aid of one, Mrs. Flora Cary, afterward Mrs. Barry, a concert singer with a fine contralto voice. She generously gave us her services. My mother’s cousin, John Ward, possessed a well-cultivated tenor voice, and he, too, nobly volunteered. With the help of these and other performers the concert for the benefit of the Cretans at last came off. We cleared four hundred dollars, and a donation from the Misses Hazard, the sisters of Mr. Thomas Hazard, brought our profits up to five hundred. Cousin John had taken degrees both as a doctor and as a lawyer, yet he practised neither profession. The possession of money was an effective damper on his activities. For many years he was a member of the well-known Mendelssohn Glee Club of New York. Unfortunately, he desired also to be a poet, a career for which nature had not intended him. He had a theory that perseverance was the main requisite. Hence he would read his verses to some unfortunate friend, and if the latter made any criticism which seemed to him just he would call on the friend a second time, and recite a revised version, asking if that were any better! His friends took refuge in polite lies. “Oh no, John, I have no taste for poetry. I’m no judge of it—it would not be of any use to read that to me!” Even the most conscientious fell from truth, after a while. When it came to the third degree—listening to the same verses, altered slightly to suit your taste, for the third time you surrendered. You accepted them as faultless—anything, rather than listen to them again. He printed a volume of poems, which he determined should be letter-perfect. Of course it was not—but the printer profited handsomely by the venture. A more practical taste was that for genealogy. We owe to his painstaking industry biographies of our common ancestors, Governor Samuel Ward and his son, Lieutenant-Colonel Ward, as well as an account of the Continental Congress before the Declaration of Independence. Thereby hangs a tale. Governor Samuel Ward was not only a member of that Congress, but presided constantly over the body as chairman of the Committee of the Whole, until March 15, 1776, when he was obliged to leave the session, owing to a violent attack of smallpox! He died shortly after, and so did not sign the famous document. His colleague, Stephen Hopkins, _did_ live to sign it, yet it was the “physical disability” of the latter which threw such a burden of work on Governor Ward that he was in an entirely unfit state to cope with the disease!