Among the pleasures of this time were frequent journeys with my father to the public institutions which, as Chairman of the Massachusetts Board of State Charities, it was his duty to visit. I have slept in almost every poorhouse and insane asylum in the State. Our visits were unannounced. As his days were so busy, we left Boston when work was over, took an afternoon train, arriving at our destination in the early evening. This gave my father the chance to see the institution in its lying down and getting up, a time when shortcomings are more evident than during hours when trustees and visitors may safely be expected. I have the pleasantest recollection of these trips and the institutions visited. Tewkesbury Almshouse was a source of a good deal of worry to my father; we were there often and at the Asylum for the Insane at Taunton. While Papa was inspecting buildings and talking with the inmates, I was left with the matron. I knew every scholar at the School for the Blind, was on familiar terms with all the inmates of the School for Idiots, of which my father was director. He kept me from contact with the inmates of these other institutions, for two reasons, I fancy. First, for their own sakes, he would have shielded them from a child’s frank brutal curiosity; secondly he would avoid my receiving any painful impression from forlorn paupers or tragic lunatics. It was different with the idiots: they were his special charge; that was a family matter. When people who know little of my father ask me to tell them about him, I hesitate and stammer; there is so much to tell, the story of his life and his service to God’s weakest creatures is almost phenomenal! Of all his manifold services to humanity, for me the greatest was his care for the feeble-minded children of New England, a care from which only death released him. Among certain faded old papers I came lately upon a sheet in my own immature handwriting, kept all these years by Laura; it proved to be the first article I ever wrote for publication. I am quite sure, however, that it never saw the light. The article is an appreciation of a certain English opera company playing in Boston during the season of 1867.