Mother was taken sick in Georgia, where she and Father were spending the winter, the winter of 1915-16, and in March, 1917, she died here at West Park. Father had gone away. Though we all knew she could not recover, we all thought she would live until he returned, but she did not, and from Cuba, where the news reached him, he wrote a beautiful tribute. Later, after his return, we laid her to rest among her family in the little cemetery in Ton Gore, the town where Father first taught school so many years ago. One by one he had seen his family go, and many of his friends. I remember that when I told him of a princess whom Carlyle said outlived her own generation and the next and into the next, he said, "How lonely she must have been!" and much of this loneliness came into his sighs and into his thoughts as he felt himself nearing the grave. As he sat at his desk in the little study, his feet wrapped in an old coat, an open fire snapping in the fireplace, his pen turned more and more to the great question. Even in 1901 he wrote from Roxbury, at the time of the death of his sister Abigail: I am much depressed, but must not indulge my grief, our band of brothers and sisters has not been broken since Wilson died, thirty-seven years ago. Which of us will go next? In the autumn weather in the autumn of our days we buried our sister beside her husband. In the same letter, from his own experience he says: I can understand your want of sympathy with the new college youth. You have learned one of the lessons of life, namely, that we cannot go back--cannot repeat our lives. There is already a gulf between you and those college days. They are of the past. You cannot put yourself in the place of the new men. The soul constantly demands new fields, new experiences. In 1905 he wrote: In this mysterious intelligence which rules and pervades nature and which is focussed and gathered up in the mind of man and becomes conscious of itself--what becomes of it at death? Does it fall back again into nature as the wave falls back into the ocean, to be gathered up and focussed in other minds? During Mother's last illness she was tenderly cared for by an old friend of the family, Dr. Clara Barrus, who then took up the burden of caring for Father, not only safeguarding his health, but helping him in his literary work as well. On November 23, 1921, we said good-bye in the station in Poughkeepsie. I looked forward to seeing him in the spring with so much joy. But he was very sad, and his hand felt frail in mine. His last letter, written in a broken, running hand, so different from the swift, virile up-and-down hand of thirty years ago, came from California, where he was urging me to join the party.