Did I ever see the heroine of Number 23? I cannot be sure! She was the affianced of Cousin Henry. Their union was opposed by Aunt Henry, though some people believed them to be secretly married. Every day at two o’clock Cousin Henry called upon the lady and passed the afternoon with her. For many years, twenty--perhaps thirty--the lovers were faithful to each other. In Spain such romances are common enough. Cousin Henry was more like a Spanish _novio_ than an American lover. I have known one other such case, of two lives that should have been passed together, divided by the opposition of the lover’s mother: in both cases the mother was able to control the son’s action, not his affections! When Aunt Henry died at the age of eighty-five the family supposed the lovers would marry, but Cousin Henry, as if still controlled by the stronger will, followed his mother almost immediately. He left Number 23 and all his property to the lady. Then a strange thing happened. My uncle had kept open house; even after he was gone Number 23 was a friendly house, like all the Ward dwellings,--the family has strong traditions of hospitality. The day the house came into the lady’s hands, the family and friends were refused admittance. The old servants were kept on with the parrot and the lap-dogs; everything was maintained exactly as it had been in the lifetime of Aunt and Cousin Henry. At two o’clock, every day in the year, the lady came to the house and spent the afternoon alone there. She lived to be an old woman; when she died she left Number 23 and all the property--even the family miniatures--to her own relations. Perhaps it is not wonderful that to a child, Number 23 was already, in 1863, a house of mystery with a certain creeping sense of hidden secrets, perhaps half divined, between mother and son. The figures of my grandfather’s generation--even those I have known--glimmer faintly in the background of my memory; they are hardly more real than Grandfather Ward himself, who died before my mother’s marriage and was the most important personage in the family. He was a banker of the firm of Prime, Ward and King, founder and president of the Bank of Commerce, patron of artists, literati, political exiles, and poor relations to the third, fourth and fifth degree. In calling up the memories of this, my first visit to New York, I touch more solid ground, for I now met for the first time in my memory, my own uncle, Sam Ward, my mother’s only surviving brother, “uncle to half the human race”, as some one once called him. He was so universal and generous a soul that I long confounded him with that greater national figure, “Uncle Sam”, and applied all references in the comic papers to him. My chagrin was poignant on finding out my mistake.