“Dudekins (Julia Romana) is in perfect and brilliant health and has grown so affectionate and loving to me that she seems more angel than human. Flossie grows in grace and good sense, and is as ever an upright and downright honest soul. Harry is a hobbledehoy--_que voulez vous_--of one who is neither man nor boy? Laura is not so robust as the others, but she is very handsome, graceful, intelligent, and good. Maud the Flibberty-gibbet is a nugget--solid, heavy, elastic, indefatigable. She promises to be the brightest, handsomest, and wildest of all. There, dear Annie, I have mentioned all--all but the one who has gone before us, the best beloved; of whom I never think without suffering anguish: you and those who know the same mystery of sorrow understand--but which to all others is inexplicable.” In these early years I knew nothing of my mother’s people, but was on good terms with my father’s. His sister, my aunt Jeannette, and her husband, Thomas B. Wales, lived at the time I am writing of at the Tremont House, a sober granite building, on the corner of Tremont and Beacon streets, whose windows looked out on the Old Granary Burying Ground on one side, and the King’s Chapel graveyard on the other. Aunt Jeannette was a large handsome woman, with blue eyes like Papa’s, thick, classically waved, gray hair, and a closely corsetted figure. She was a shy and silent person. When Papa took me to see her on Sunday afternoons, there was little conversation between them. She kept a supply of brittle molasses and pink cinnamon candies for visiting nieces and nephews. If I were left alone with her, she would startle me with the question: “Do you love your father?” I adored my father; the question was nettling as implying doubts, I could not be made to answer it. The Howes are reserved and silent people, little given to talking of themselves or their concerns. How sorry I am that I did not learn more about my father’s youth and ancestry from Aunt Jeannette. When my sister Laura came to write my father’s life, she gathered some interesting facts concerning his descent: “His grandfather, Edward Compton Howe, was one of the ‘Indians’ of the Boston Tea Party. His father, Joseph Neals Howe, was a maker of ropes and cordage, and had a large ropewalk near the site of the present Public Garden. This business was, at one time, extremely profitable, and my grandfather prospered in it; but in the War of 1812 he had the misfortune to supply the United States Government with large quantities of ropes and cordage, for which he was never paid.... His mother was of the family of Jeremy and Richard Gridley, the former attorney-general of the royal province of Massachusetts Bay, who served at the taking of Louisburg, fortified Bunker Hill the night before the battle, and, under Washington’s orders, aided in preparing the siegeworks which finally drove the British from Boston.”[1]