“I remember him as very tall, stooping a little, with white hair and mild blue eyes, which matched well his composed speech and manners.” I have called Great-grandfather Ward a merchant, but he was far more than that. The son of Governor Ward of Rhode Island, he was only eighteen when, as a gallant young captain, he marched his company to the siege of Boston; and then (as his grandson writes me to-day) he “marched through the wilderness of Maine, through snow and ice, barefoot, to Quebec.” Some of my readers may possess an engraving of Trumbull’s famous painting of the “Attack on Quebec.” Look in the left-hand corner, and you will see a group of three,--one of them a young, active figure with flashing eyes; that is Great-grandfather Ward. He rose to be major, then lieutenant-colonel; was at Peekskill, Valley Forge, and Red Bank, and wrote the official account of the last-named battle, which may be found in Washington’s correspondence. Besides being a good man and a brave soldier, he was a very good grandfather; and this made it all the more naughty for his granddaughter Julia to behave as she did one day. Being then a little child, she sat down at the piano, placed a music-book on the rack, and began to pound and thump on the keys, making the hideous discord which seems always to afford pleasure to the young. Her grandfather was sitting by, book in hand; and after enduring the noise for some time patiently, he said in his kind, courtly way, “Is it so set down in the book, my dear?” “Yes, Grandpapa!” said naughty Julia, and went on banging; while grandpapa, who made no pretense of being a musician, offered no further comment or remonstrance. Julia grew up a student and a dreamer. She confesses to having been an extremely absent person, and much of the time unconscious of what passed around her. “In the large rooms of my father’s house,” she says, “I walked up and down, perpetually alone, dreaming of extraordinary things that I should see and do. I now began to read Shakspere and Byron, and to try my hand at poems and plays.” She rejoices that none of the productions of this period were published, and adds: “I regard it as a piece of great good fortune; for a little praise or a little censure would have been a much more disturbing element in those days than in these.” I wish these sentiments were more general with young writers.