Uncle Sam was twice married. His first wife was Emily Astor, with whom he lived happily during her short life. She died soon after the marriage, leaving him one daughter, Emily Margaret Ward. Later he married Medora Grimes. At that time I am now writing of, he was already separated from his second wife, who with their two sons lived in Paris. I knew vaguely that here was a mystery and unhappiness I must not ask about. The two boys died young; I never saw either of them. My mother neither criticized nor tolerated criticism of Uncle Sam’s second wife. The marriage had not been happy--it was a case of incompatibility; that was all there was to say about it. His first wife’s death was his greatest misfortune. For posterity that brief union with Emily Astor was a fortunate one, for from it sprang the Clan Chanler, those interesting younger cousins of ours, Uncle Sam’s only descendants, who have inherited much of his charm, many of his gifts, and are among the marked men and women of their time. Their mother, my Cousin Maddie, married Winthrop Chanler, and became the mother of eleven children, eight of whom are now living. I remember Cousin Maddie as a gracious, delightful woman and can see her now in fancy with her fine, red-gold hair and beautifully shaped head, her little brood of children clustered about her, at their Newport villa on the cliffs overlooking the first beach. Was it on this, my first visit to New York, or a later one, that some reckless New York relative took me to Niblo’s Garden to see the “Black Crook”? It was a dazzling performance, revealing undreamed-of theatrical possibilities. The shame which, I afterwards learned, I should have felt at the sight of the lightly clad _corps de ballet_ was entirely lacking. I only felt wonderment at their agility, at the flexibility of their pink satin toes. The normal healthy child recognized instinctively the art, the labor, the long training that enabled those nymphs, fairies, and amazons to fly from wing to wing, rise on tiptoe, sink to earth, whirl on one foot, the other extended at right angles! Far from being shocked, I was delighted and spent hours in trying to copy the agility, the poetry of motion of those poor _coryphées_ of the “Black Crook.” My fixed resolve to become a bareback circus rider was shaken. Would it not be even better than vaulting lightly through paper rings held up by a clown, to shoot up from the stage in an enormous rose, descend lightly and caper to hidden music? There was a flying trip to Washington during the New York visit. To have been in the Capital and have no memory of the great events and famous men of the time is distressing. What I do remember is so trivial. We stopped at Wilmington, Delaware, where a powerful negro dressed in white boarded the train and passed through the cars calling out: “Here’s your hot fried oysters! You, Miss? You, Sah?”