st by Mr. Brace
and my father. My father was greatly interested in the societies to
prevent cruelty to children and cruelty to animals. On Sundays he had
a mission class. On his way to it he used to drop us children at our
Sunday-school in Dr. Adams's Presbyterian Church on Madison Square; I
remember hearing my aunt, my mother's sister, saying that when he walked
along with us children he always reminded her of Greatheart in Bunyan.
Under the spur of his example I taught a mission class myself for three
years before going to college and for all four years that I was in
college. I do not think I made much of a success of it. But the other
day on getting out of a taxi in New York the chauffeur spoke to me and
told me that he was one of my old Sunday-school pupils. I remembered him
well, and was much pleased to find that he was an ardent Bull Mooser!
My mother, Martha Bulloch, was a sweet, gracious, beautiful Southern
woman, a delightful companion and beloved by everybody. She was entirely
"unreconstructed" to the day of her death. Her mother, my grandmother,
one of the dearest of old ladies, lived with us, and was distinctly
overindulgent to us children, being quite unable to harden her heart
towards us even when the occasion demanded it. Towards the close of the
Civil War, although a very small boy, I grew to have a partial but alert
understanding of the fact that the family were not one in their views
about that conflict, my father being a strong Lincoln Republican; and
once, when I felt that I had been wronged by maternal discipline during
the day, I attempted a partial vengeance by praying with loud fervor
for the success of the Union arms, when we all came to say our prayers
before my mother in the evening. She was not only a most devoted mother,
but was also blessed with a strong sense of humor, and she was too much
amused to punish me; but I was warned not to repeat the offense, under
penalty of my father's being informed--he being the dispenser of serious
punishment. Morning prayers were with my father. We used to stand at the
foot of the stairs, and when father came down we called out, "I speak
for you and the cubby-hole too!" There were three of us young children,
and we used to sit with father on the sofa while he conducted morning
prayers. The place between father and the arm of the sofa we called the
"cubby-hole." The child who got that place we regarded as especially
favored both in comfort and somehow or ot
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