Various as were the topics of instruction pursued by my youthful teachers, my father had still others. He was “Captain” Stephen Barton, had served as a non-commissioned officer, under General Wayne (Mad Anthony) in the French and Indian Wars on the then Western frontiers. His soldier habits and tastes never left him. Those were also strong political days—Andrew Jackson days—and very naturally my father became my instructor in military and political lore. I listened breathlessly to his war stories. Illustrations were called for, and we made battles and fought them. Every shade of military etiquette was regarded. Generals, colonels, captains and sergeants were given their proper place and rank. So with the political world; the president, cabinet and leading officers of the government were learned by heart, and nothing gratified the keen humor of my father more than the parrot-like readiness with which I lisped these often difficult names, and the accuracy with which I repeated them upon request. My elder sister, with a teacher’s intuition, mistrusting that my ideas on these points might be somewhat vague, confidentially drew from me one day my impressions in regard to the personages whose names I handled so glibly, and to the amusement of the family found that I had no conception of their being men like other men, but had invested them with miraculous size and importance. I thought the president might be as large as the meeting house, and the vice-president perhaps the size of the school house. And yet I am not going to say that even this instruction had never any value for me. When later, I, like all the rest of our country people, was suddenly thrust into the mysteries of war, and had to find and take my place and part in it, I found myself far less a stranger to the conditions than most women, or even ordinary men for that matter; I never addressed a colonel as captain, got my cavalry on foot, or mounted my infantry. My mother, like the sensible woman that she was, seeming to conclude that there were plenty of instructors without her, attempted very little, but rather regarded the whole thing as a sort of mental conglomeration, and looked on with a kind of amused curiosity to see what they would make of it. Indeed, I heard her remark many years after, that I came out with a more level head than she would have thought possible.