Mrs. Clark, who was Elizabeth Scriven, was a woman of exceptional gifts of mind and benignance of character, well qualified to assume the responsibilities which fell upon her when Alfred Corning Clark died, at the age of fifty-three years, in 1896. With cultivated tastes, she had also a practical talent for business, and, although well served by agents in the management of her large interests, was always thoroughly informed and full of initiative. In New York, among men of affairs, she was regarded as one of the most far-seeing judges of real estate values in the city. In the management of her domestic and other concerns she had an extraordinary faculty for administration, which failed of attaining genius only through the effort which she put forth to give personal attention to details. This amiable weakness nevertheless added the interest of her personality to undertakings that might have failed for the lack of such a spirit as hers; and in her many charities the personal touch which she took the trouble to give added infinitely to the happiness and self-respect of those to whom her kindness, as in neighborly thoughtfulness, was extended. In Cooperstown Mrs. Clark became an arbiter of the social and moral virtues, and the things that she frowned upon were usually not done. She had a wholesome influence in resisting certain excesses which not seldom appear in communities partly given over to the pursuit of pleasure. In some innovations against which she protested, Mrs. Clark at last gracefully yielded to the inevitable. This was the case with automobiles, which, when they first appeared upon the country roads, she regarded with the alarm and disgust of one devoted to a carriage and horses, and would have banished them from Otsego if she had had the power. In that period of transition few country roads were adapted to the use of motors, and to meet one of the new machines while driving in a carriage along the lake shore was to suffer the apprehension of imminent death from the fury of plunging horses, and to be nearly choked in a cloud of dust. Mrs. Clark was fond of walking, and she was a familiar figure in the residence streets of the village in summer, usually dressed in white, without a bonnet, and carrying a white parasol above her head, as she moved with quick step upon some errand.