In spite of his crime, I felt a pang of pity for Wilkes Booth when I read of his tragic death. It was necessary that he should be shot down, like a creature at bay, but the attendant circumstances, the firing through the cracks of the barn, lent additional ignominy to his fate. While we were still living at “Green Peace” our youngest brother, Samuel Gridley Howe, Jr., was born. He was a fine, large baby, weighing twelve pounds at birth. Soon after his arrival in this world (on Christmas Day, 1859), and while our mother was still confined to her room, several of us were attacked with scarlet fever. The great danger of contagion from this disease was not then clearly understood. My father inquired of Mr. Gardner, headmaster of the Boston Latin School, whether he wished brother Harry, who had not contracted the fever, to remain away. Mr. Gardner decided it would be safer for the boy to do so. The breaking out of smallpox at the Idiot School, of which my father retained the supervision, brought my mother a new anxiety. Would it come to her, and was it, as she had heard, fatal in confinement cases? Fortunately, our household escaped the disease and the scarlet fever left no bad effects behind. Little Sammy was a beautiful and healthy child, yet he fell a victim to diphtheritic croup in May, 1863, when he was three and a half years old. His death brought me the first realization of the meaning of sorrow. We had lost my father’s sister, our kind and devoted Aunt Lizzie, two years earlier, but the loss of little Sammy was a much greater bereavement. I could not understand then, nor do I now, the point of view which those persons take who declare that it is a beautiful thing for a little innocent child to leave this world and go to heaven. I felt, at seventeen, as I do at seventy, that it is contrary to the laws of nature for a child to die. It is the saddest death of all, for the little one has been cut off untimely from the life on this earth that his Creator meant him to enjoy. As this was my first experience of deep sorrow, it brought me the first knowledge of the beautiful human sympathy without which grief would be unendurable. Friends and relatives gathered about my stricken parents, helping them to bear the dull burden of grief. It made my father seriously ill; indeed, he grieved for the boy to the end of his life. My mother, like most women, was able to give more expression to her sorrow. After her death we found a little book of verses and a letter written to her lost darling, in which she poured out her grief. In her journal are many mentions of the little boy, showing how his memory dwelt in her heart throughout her life.