Mom' Grace, who
was for a time my mother's nurse, and whom I had supposed to be dead,
but who greeted me when I did come to Roswell, very respectable, and
apparently with years of life before her. The two chief personages of
the drama that used to be repeated to us were Daddy Luke, the Negro
overseer, and his wife, Mom' Charlotte. I never saw either Daddy Luke
or Mom' Charlotte, but I inherited the care of them when my mother died.
After the close of the war they resolutely refused to be emancipated
or leave the place. The only demand they made upon us was enough money
annually to get a new "critter," that is, a mule. With a certain lack of
ingenuity the mule was reported each Christmas as having passed away,
or at least as having become so infirm as to necessitate a successor--a
solemn fiction which neither deceived nor was intended to deceive, but
which furnished a gauge for the size of the Christmas gift.

My maternal grandfather's house was on the line of Sherman's march to
the sea, and pretty much everything in it that was portable was taken by
the boys in blue, including most of the books in the library. When I
was President the facts about my ancestry were published, and a
former soldier in Sherman's army sent me back one of the books with
my grandfather's name in it. It was a little copy of the poems of "Mr.
Gray"--an eighteenth-century edition printed in Glasgow.

On October 27, 1858, I was born at No. 28 East Twentieth Street, New
York City, in the house in which we lived during the time that my two
sisters and my brother and I were small children. It was furnished
in the canonical taste of the New York which George William Curtis
described in the _Potiphar Papers_. The black haircloth furniture in the
dining-room scratched the bare legs of the children when they sat on
it. The middle room was a library, with tables, chairs, and bookcases of
gloomy respectability. It was without windows, and so was available only
at night. The front room, the parlor, seemed to us children to be a room
of much splendor, but was open for general use only on Sunday evening
or on rare occasions when there were parties. The Sunday evening family
gathering was the redeeming feature in a day which otherwise we children
did not enjoy--chiefly because we were all of us made to wear clean
clothes and keep neat. The ornaments of that parlor I remember now,
including the gas chandelier decorated with a great quantity of
cut-glass prisms