with others in the oak chest.

"Some months before the steamboat accident that shattered my nerves, and
preceded the long illness, I was browsing at a bookstall, on my way up
from college homeward, when I came across a copy of Charlotte Temple--one
of the dozen later editions--printed in New York by one R. Hobbs, in
1827, its distinguishing interest lying in a frontispiece depicting
Charlotte's flight from Portsmouth.

"The story had long been a familiar one, and I, in common with others of
many times my age and judgment, had lingered before the slab that bears
her name in the graveyard of old Trinity, and sometimes laid a flower on
it for sympathy's sake, as I have done many times since.

"On my return home I showed the little book to my mother, and as she held
it in her hinds and read a word here and there, she too began to journey
backward to her school days, and asked my father to bring out her
treasure chest, and from it she took her school relics,--a tattered
ribbon watch-guard fastened by a flat gold buckle that Mrs. Rowson had
given her as a reward for good conduct, and a package of letters. She
spent an hour reading these, and old ties strengthened as she read. I can
see her now as she sat bolstered by pillows in her reclining chair, a
writing tray upon her knees, penning a long letter.

"A few months afterward, as I lay in my bed too weak even to stir, your
father stood there, looking across the footboard at me,--the answer to
that letter. Your father, tall and strong of body and brain, a Harvard
graduate drawn to New York to study medicine at the College of Physicians
and Surgeons. His eyes of strengthening manly pity looked into mine and
drew me slowly back to life with them.

"His long absence as surgeon in the Civil War, the settling down as a
country doctor, and even loving the same woman, has not separated us.
Never more than a few months passed but our thoughts met on paper, or our
hands clasped. His solicitude in a large measure restored my health, so
that at sixty-three, physically, I can hold my own with any man of my
age, and to-day I walk my ten miles with less ado than many younger men.
Because of my intense dislike of the modern means of street
transportation, I have kept on walking ever since the time that your
father and I footed it from Washington Park to Van Cortlandt Manor,
through the muskrat marshes whereon the park plaza now stands, up
through the wilds of the future Central Park, McG