A few words regarding my mother may not here be out of place. Married at sixteen, she died at the age of twenty-seven, so beloved and mourned by all who knew her that my early years were full of the testimony borne by surviving friends to the beauty and charm of her character. She had been a pupil at the school of Mrs. Elizabeth Graham, of saintly memory, and had inherited from her own mother a taste for intellectual pursuits. She was especially fond of poetry and a few lovely poems of hers remain to show that she was no stranger to its sacred domain. One of these was printed in a periodical of her own time, and is preserved in Griswold's "Female Poets of America." Another set of verses is addressed to me in the days of my babyhood. All of these bear the imprint of her deeply religious character. Mrs. Margaret Armstrong Astor, of whom more will be said in these annals, remembered my mother as prominent in the society of her youth, and spoke of her as beautiful in countenance. An old lady, resident in Bordentown, N. J., where Joseph, ex-king of Spain, made his home for many years, had seen my mother arrayed for a dinner at this royal residence, in a white dress, probably of embroidered cambric, and a lilac turban. Her early death was a lifelong misfortune to her children, who, although tenderly bred and carefully watched, have been forced to pass their days without the dear refuge of a mother's heart, the wise guidance of a mother's inspiration. A dear old cousin of my father's, who lived to the age of one hundred and two years, loved to talk of a visit which she had made in her youth to my grandfather Ward, then resident in New York. She had not quite forgiven him for not allowing her to attend an assembly on which, being only sixteen years of age, she had set her heart. Years after this time, when such vanities had quite gone out of her mind, she again visited relatives in the city, and came to spend the day with my mother. Of this occasion she said to me: "Julia, your mother's tact was remarkable, and she showed it on that day, for, knowing me to be a young woman of serious character, she presented me on my arrival with a plain linen collar which she had made for me. On a table beside her lay Law's 'Serious Call to the Unconverted.' Don't you see how well she had suited matters to my taste?" This aged relative used to boast that she had never read a novel. She desired to make one exception in favor of the story of the Schönberg-Cotta family, but, hearing that it was a work of fiction, esteemed it safest to adhere to the rule which she had observed for so many years. Her son, lately deceased, once told me that when she felt called upon to chastise him for some childish offense, she would pray over him so long that he would cry out: "Mother, it's time to begin whipping." Her husband was a son of General Nathanael Greene, of Revolutionary fame.