aloof from the wide, dusty road
that led to the mills.

With us lived my young, unmarried aunt, Millie....

My grandmother had no education. She could barely read and write.

And she believed in everybody.

She was stout ... sparse-haired ... wore a switch ... had kindly,
confiding, blue eyes.

Beggars, tramps, pack-peddlers, book-agents, fortune-tellers,--she lent
a credulous ear to all,--helped others when we ourselves needed help,
signed up for preposterous articles on "easy" monthly payments,--gave
away food, starving her appetite and ours.

When, child though I was, even I protested, she would say, "well,
Johnnie, you might be a tramp some day, and how would I feel if I
thought some one was turning you away hungry?"

* * * * *

My Grandfather Gregory was a little, alert, erect, suave man,--he was a
man whose nature was such that he would rather gain a dollar by some
cheeky, brazen, off-colour practice than earn a hundred by honest
methods.

He had keen grey eyes that looked you in the face in utter, disarming
frankness. He was always immaculately dressed. He talked continually
about money, and about how people abused his confidence and his trust in
men. But there was a sharpness like pointed needles in the pupils of his
eyes that betrayed his true nature.

Coming to Mornington as one of the city's pioneers, at first he had kept
neck to neck in social prestige with the Babsons, Guelders, and the
rest, and had built the big house that my grandmother, my aunt, and
myself now lived in, on Mansion avenue....

When the Civil War broke out, that streak of adventure and daring in my
grandfather which in peace times turned him to shady financial
transactions, now caused him to enlist. And before the end of the war he
had gone far up in the ranks.

After the war he came into still more money by a manufacturing business
which he set up. But the secret process of the special kind of material
which he manufactured he inveigled out of a comrade in arms. The latter
never derived a cent from it. My grandfather stole the patent, taking it
out in his own name. The other man had trusted him, remembering the
times they had fought shoulder to shoulder, and had bivouacked
together....

My grandfather, though so small as to be almost diminutive, was spry and
brave as an aroused wasp when anyone insulted him. Several times he
faced down burly-bodied men who had threatened to kill him for hi