UNCLE SAM WARD 68 MY FATHER, DR. SAMUEL GRIDLEY HOWE 68 DR. HENRY MARION HOWE AND HIS SISTERS 86 EDWARD ASKEW SOTHERN 122 FRANCIS BRET HARTE 128 FRANCIS MARION CRAWFORD 166 THE DRAWING ROOM AT 241 BEACON ST. 198 DR. HENRY MARION HOWE 200 MARGARET DELAND 204 JOHN ELLIOTT 216 LAURA E. RICHARDS 254 FLORENCE HOWE HALL 254 MY MOTHER, JULIA WARD HOWE 286 QUEEN MARGHERITA OF ITALY 304 HENRY JAMES 316 MRS. JOHN LOWELL GARDNER 378 THREE GENERATIONS CHAPTER I THE TWILIGHT OF THE GODS March 1st, 1916. Henry James is dead. The news came to-day. A sudden warmth of old friendship, a kindness of other years leaps up within me, and the memory of how he looked at our house in Rome on a certain birthday of his that corresponds to my own latest milestone. It was a warm day in mid-April. We were lunching on the terrace of the Palazzo Rusticucci, among the roses that shielded us from the windows of the Vatican. We drank his health in his favorite _vino di Orvieto_; he bowed with that exquisite courtesy of his and said in answer to our congratulations: “This is the time when one lights the candle, goes through the house, and takes an account of stock!” I can hear that slow, careful, hesitating voice of his and catch the keen shy glance he gave me as he spoke. The words come back to me with a new meaning; they seem like a legacy from an old friend. It is high time that I, too, should light the candle, go through the house, and take an account of stock. What’s here worth saving? Love and friendship, a treasure piled high as the rafters of the house of life. To be of any value, an accounting must be honest; this I shall remember in taking my account of stock and in telling how I acquired it. * * * * * I was born near midday on the ninth of November, 1854, in a large room in the apartment familiarly known as “Doctor’s Part”, at the Perkins Institution for the Blind, South Boston. My first friend, Mrs. Margaret MacDonald, familiarly called D.D., presided at this, my earliest introduction to society.