vigorous
Barclay who held her receptions to notable men in her bedroom during the
years of her bedridden condition." She was the proprietor of the "Half
Way House," a tavern located between Fayetteville and Raleigh; and in
her old age she kept royal state, in the fashion which Page describes,
for such as were socially entitled to this consideration. The most vivid
impression which her present-day descendants retain is that of her
fervent devotion to the Southern cause. She carried the spirit of
secession to such an extreme that she had the gate to her yard painted
to give a complete presentment of the Confederate Flag. Walter Page's
mother, the granddaughter of this determined and rebellious lady, had
also her positive quality, but in a somewhat more subdued form. She did
not die until 1897, and so the recollection of her is fresh and vivid.
As a mature woman she was undemonstrative and soft spoken; a Methodist
of old-fashioned Wesleyan type, she dressed with a Quaker-like
simplicity, her brown hair brushed flatly down upon a finely shaped head
and her garments destitute of ruffles or ornamentation. The home which
she directed was a home without playing cards or dancing or smoking or
wine-bibbing or other worldly frivolities, yet the memories of her
presence which Catherine Page has left are not at all austere. Duty was
with her the prime consideration of life, and fundamental morals the
first conceptions which she instilled in her children's growing minds,
yet she had a quiet sense of humour and a real love of fun.

She had also strong likes and dislikes, and was not especially
hospitable to men and women who fell under her disapproval. A small
North Carolina town, in the years preceding and following the Civil
War, was not a fruitful soil for cultivating an interest in things
intellectual, yet those who remember Walter Page's mother remember her
always with a book in her hand. She would read at her knitting and at
her miscellaneous household duties, which were rather arduous in the
straitened days that followed the war, and the books she read were
always substantial ones. Perhaps because her son Walter was in delicate
health, perhaps because his early tastes and temperament were not unlike
her own, perhaps because he was her oldest surviving child, the fact
remains that, of a family of eight, he was generally regarded as the
child with whom she was especially sympathetic. The picture of mother
and son in those early d