The Pickerings were an ancient Southern--and before that, an English--family. Some of the members lived in South Carolina, some in Virginia, others in Maryland. One of them sat in Washington's first cabinet. Like my grandfather, they were all slave-owners. Judge Gilbert Pickering was chairman of Cromwell's committee that cut off King Charles's head. Grandfather Pickering was a liberal man in many ways. I have spoken already of his freeing his own slaves. He chose the calling of an itinerant Methodist preacher, when to do so meant tremendous financial sacrifice and the loss of social rank. He almost starved at it, but he stuck to it with great nobleness of mind. It gave him a sort of religious freedom. Once he could have been a bishop in the New England branch of Methodism; but he refused the ambitious title. He did not believe in bishops for their church. And so, setting aside every offer of preferment, every opportunity of rising or getting on in the world, he chose to labor at his simple calling, like a martyr. And he would shortly have found martyrdom in starvation, had it not been for my lovely grandmother, with her thrift and care. The branch of Methodists to which my grandfather belonged was very liberal. It was so liberal, indeed, that my mother and her five sisters had all been educated at the Ursuline convent at Charlestown, Mass., which was destroyed by the mob in '42. I remember that after the mob burned this convent to the ground the Methodists wanted to buy the site, and applied to the Roman Catholic archbishop in Boston, who replied: "We sometimes purchase, but we never sell." Another incident of my boyhood may be recalled here, as it illustrates the stubborn pride that had begun to show itself even then. One day an elegant carriage drove up to the old house, and a young lady, beautifully dressed, got out and asked to see George Train. I went up to her, and she told me who she was. "You must remember, when you grow up," she said, "that I am Miss Sallie Rhoades. We are one of the few families of Maryland," she added, with a pride that was evident even to my boyish eyes, "that have been able to support their carriages for one hundred and fifty years." She spoke with the air of a _grande dame_, which stung my own pride keenly. "While I am very glad to meet my Southern relative," I said, with equal pride, even if I could not equal her manner, "we have kept our ox-cart on the old farm for two hundred years." I expected the additional half a century to stagger her. But it did not seem to reach home; and she drove away. This was the last I ever saw of "Miss Sallie Rhoades, of Maryland."