I was in many respects an odd one in my father's family. I was like a graft from some other tree. And this is always a disadvantage to a man--not to be the logical outcome of what went before him, not to be backed up by his family and inheritance--to be of the nature of a sport. It seems as if I had more intellectual capital than I was entitled to and robbed some of the rest of the family, while I had a full measure of the family weaknesses. I can remember how abashed I used to be as a child when strangers or relatives, visiting us for the first time, after looking the rest of the children over, would ask, pointing to me, "That is not your boy--whose is he?" I have no idea that I looked different from the others, because I can see the family stamp upon my face very plainly until this day. My face resembles Hiram's more than any of the others, and I have a deeper attachment for him than for any of the rest of my brothers. Hiram was a dreamer, too, and he had his own idealism which expressed itself in love of bees, of which he kept many hives at one time, and of fancy stock, sheep, pigs, poultry, and a desire to see other lands. His bees and fancy stock never paid him, but he always expected they would the next year. But they yielded him honey and wool of a certain intangible, satisfying kind. To be the owner of a Cotswold ram or ewe for which he had paid one hundred dollars or more gave him rare satisfaction. One season, in his innocence, he took some of his fancy sheep to the state fair at Syracuse, not knowing that an unknown outsider stood no chance at all on such an occasion. Hiram always had to have some sort of a plaything. Though no hunter and an indifferent marksman, he had during his life several fancy rifles. Once when he came to Washington to visit me, he brought his rifle with him, carrying the naked weapon in his hand or upon his shoulder. The act was merely the whim of a boy who likes to take his playthings with him. Hiram certainly had not come to "shoot up" the town. In the early '60's he had a fifty-dollar rifle made by a famous rifle maker in Utica. There was some hitch or misunderstanding about it and Hiram made the trip to Utica on foot. I was at home that summer and I recall seeing him start off one June day, wearing a black coat, bent on his fifty-mile walk to see about his pet rifle. Of course nothing came of it. The rifle maker had Hiram's money, and he put him off with fair words; then something happened and the gun never came to Hiram's hand.