He went to work as clerk in a local hotel, in the rapidly growing town. Crazy with grief, he watched my mother drop out of his life a little more each day. * * * * * My father and mother both had tempers that flared up and sank as suddenly. * * * * * I had lung fever when I was a baby. That was what they called it then. I nearly died of it. It left me very frail in body. * * * * * As soon as I could walk and talk my mother made a great companion of me. She didn't treat me as if I were only a child. She treated me like a grown-up companion. I am told that I would follow her about the house from room to room, clutching at her skirts, while she was dusting and sweeping and working. And to hear us two talking with each other, you would have imagined there was a houseful of people. * * * * * My father's anguish over my mother's death caused him to break loose from all ties. His grief goaded him so that he went about aimlessly. He roamed from state to state, haunted by her memory. He worked at all sorts of jobs. Once he even dug ditches for seventy-five cents a day. He had all sorts of adventures, roaming about. As for me, I was left alone with my grandmother, his mother,--in the big house which stood back under the trees, aloof from the wide, dusty road that led to the mills. With us lived my young, unmarried aunt, Millie.... My grandmother had no education. She could barely read and write. And she believed in everybody. She was stout ... sparse-haired ... wore a switch ... had kindly, confiding, blue eyes. Beggars, tramps, pack-peddlers, book-agents, fortune-tellers,--she lent a credulous ear to all,--helped others when we ourselves needed help, signed up for preposterous articles on "easy" monthly payments,--gave away food, starving her appetite and ours. When, child though I was, even I protested, she would say, "well, Johnnie, you might be a tramp some day, and how would I feel if I thought some one was turning you away hungry?" * * * * * My Grandfather Gregory was a little, alert, erect, suave man,--he was a man whose nature was such that he would rather gain a dollar by some cheeky, brazen, off-colour practice than earn a hundred by honest methods. He had keen grey eyes that looked you in the face in utter, disarming frankness. He was always immaculately dressed. He talked continually about money, and about how people abused his confidence and his trust in men. But there was a sharpness like pointed needles in the pupils of his eyes that betrayed his true nature. Coming to Mornington as one of the city's pioneers, at first he had kept neck to neck in social prestige with the Babsons, Guelders, and the rest, and had built the big house that my grandmother, my aunt, and myself now lived in, on Mansion avenue....