Mary Larcom Ober was the daughter of Mary Larcom and Benjamin Ober. Mrs. Ober's parents were Andrew and Molly, (Standley) Larcom. Andrew's father and mother were Jonathan and Abigail (Ober) Larcom; they had eight children, the three youngest of whom are connected with this story. The oldest of these three was David who married Elizabeth Haskell known as "Aunt Betsey"; they had a son David. The next brother was Benjamin whose first wife was Charlotte Ives, and his second, Lois Barrett. Of this second marriage, one of the daughters was Lucy Larcom, the poetess and the editor also of the "Lowell Offering." Andrew Larcom was the youngest of these brothers. Thus it is that his granddaughter, our Mary, was a cousin in the next generation of Lucy Larcom; although she was older than Mary they were always great friends and what Lucy tells us in "A New England Girlhood" of her experience is as true of one as of the other little girl. "Our parents considered it a duty that they owed to the youngest of us to teach us doctrines. And we believed in our instructors, if we could not always digest their instructions." "We learned to reverence truth as they received it and lived it, and to feel that the search for truth was the one chief end of our being. It was a pity that we were expected to begin thinking upon hard subjects so soon, and it is also a pity that we were set to hard work while so young. Yet these were both the inevitable results of circumstances then existing, and perhaps the two belonged together. Perhaps habits of conscientious work induce thought and habits of right thinking. Certainly right thinking naturally impels people to work." Mr. Andrew Larcom lived on the farm where Mr. Gordon Dexter now lives; here our Mary's mother was born and passed her childhood. It was a delightful farm with much less woodland than now and its boundaries were much larger; salt hay was cut on the marsh land that stretched toward the sea, and where it ended above the beach there were thickets of wild plum, whose purple fruit made delicious preserves. This marsh was not drained as it is now, little rivers of water ran through it at high tide reflecting the sunlight. When Benjamin Ober, who was first mate of an East Indiaman, married Mary Larcom they went to live in the house on the north side of Mingo Beach Hill. It was a smaller house then, and close to the road, with a lovely outlook over the sea. A page of Lucy Larcom's gives so charming an account of "the Farms" it must be quoted here, as Mary Ober was fond of it. The old homestead was where Andrew and Mary Larcom lived, while "Uncle David" and "Aunt Betsey" lived in the house which we know as Mary Ober's house in the middle of the village.