The little California community was impressed by the close intimacy of the home-life of the Canadian family--closer than was usual in hurriedly settled Western towns. The father found time to take all three boys on daily walks. Another companion remembers seeing them starting off together for a day's hunting and fishing. But it was the mother, who read aloud to them and told them stories and exacted quick obedience from them, who was the real power in the house. There were regular family prayers, and family singing of hymns and songs. This last custom survived among the brothers and sister through all the years. Even after all had families of their own, and many cares, some chance reunion, or a little family dinner would, at parting, quicken memory and, with hats and coats already on, perhaps, in readiness to separate to their homes, they would stand together and shout, in unison, some song of the hour or some of their old Scotch melodies with that pleasant harmony of voices of one timbre, heard only in family singing. Lane had a baritone of stirring quality, coming straight from his big lungs, and loved music all his life. In the last weeks of his life he more than once wrote of his pleasure in his brother's singing. At Rochester, a few days before his operation, he reassured an anxious friend by writing, "My brother George is here, with his splendid philosophy and his Scotch songs." His love and loyalty to past ties, though great and persistent, still left his ideal of loyalty unsatisfied. Toward the end of his life he wrote, "Roots we all have and we must not be torn up from them and flung about as if we were young things that could take hold in any soil. I have been--America has been--too indifferent to roots--home roots, school roots. ... We should love stability and tradition as well as love adventure and advancement." But the practical labors of his life were directed toward creating means to modify tradition in favor of a larger sort of justice than the past had known. Resignation had no part in his political creed. "I hold with old Cicero 'that the whole glory of virtue is in activity,'" comes from him with the ring of authentic temperament. And of a friend's biography he wrote, "What a fine life--all fight, interwoven with fun and friendship." [Illustration with caption: FRANKLIN K. LANE WITH HIS YOUNGER BROTHERS, GEORGE AND FREDERIC] All the anecdotes of his boyhood show him in action, moving among his fellows, organizing, leading, and administering rough-and- tumble justice.