At the close of the evening sessions, Mr. Hazard used to walk in the mysterious old garden where, he told me, his dead wife often joined him, walked with him, leant upon his arm. On one occasion she allowed him to cut a small piece from the spirit lace drapery in which she was arrayed. He showed me the fragment the next day; it proved to be the same “wash blonde” I had bought at Edward Lawton’s shop in Thames Street. The materialized spirits allowed Mr. Hazard to cut off locks of their hair for remembrance. The last time I was in the parlor of Vaucluse, there hung on the wall a glass case with strands of hair of every shade and degree of fineness: the name of the friend or relative from whose head it had been cut while the medium was in trance was written beside each. I remember that in the glass case the hair of Uncle Jonas Minturn was dark red, though my impression is that in life it was of another shade! Among the young faces that look at me from the old garden at Vaucluse, the fairest is that of my “Twin”, Edith Blackler, a tall girl with skin like a sunburnt peach, eyes like a clear brown brook, teeth like fresh peeled almonds, and a laugh that made the old feel young, and the young feel immortal. We were as nearly inseparable as the four miles that lay between Lawton’s Valley and Vaucluse allowed: together we tramped the country roads, swam the waters of Narragansett, waded the streams and sailed the seas that bound our island home. When I was not at Vaucluse, my Twin was with me at Lawton’s Valley. Here Mama was mistress of the revels, and here young and old, grave and gay, fashionable and unfashionable, gladly gathered when she waved her fairy wand. One afternoon when all Newport, both the “intellectuals” of the Point and the frivolous of the Avenue, mingled in a friendly crowd in the Valley for afternoon tea, we had some famous charades. The final scene represented Blondin crossing Niagara Falls. A plank was laid across the summit of the waterfall just below the old mill, the “middle fall”, we called it, for at that time there were three falls in Lawton’s Valley. A tiny camp chair was placed in the middle of the plank, and here one of my mother’s familiars (was it William Hunt or Hamilton Wilde?) proceeded to compound an omelette, while the brook sang, the silver birch rustled, and the insects trilled their evening hymn. Henry James was of the company that day; something of its magic always lingered in his tenacious memory, as it does in my random recollections.