hey
furnished much of the charm and poetic suggestion of my childhood. Most
of what I have in the way of feeling for music, for rhythm, I derive
from my mother's side of the house, for it was almost entirely Celt in
every characteristic. She herself was a wordless poet, a sensitive
singer of sad romantic songs.

Father was by nature an orator and a lover of the drama. So far as I am
aware, he never read a poem if he could help it, and yet he responded
instantly to music, and was instinctively courtly in manner. His mind
was clear, positive and definite, and his utterances fluent. Orderly,
resolute and thorough in all that he did, he despised William
McClintock's easy-going habits of husbandry, and found David's lack of
"push," of business enterprise, deeply irritating. And yet he loved them
both and respected my mother for defending them.

To me, in those days, the shortcomings of the McClintocks did not appear
particularly heinous. All our neighbors were living in log houses and
frame shanties built beside the brooks, or set close against the
hillsides, and William's small unpainted dwelling seemed a natural
feature of the landscape, but as the years passed and other and more
enterprising settlers built big barns, and shining white houses, the
gray and leaning stables, sagging gates and roofs of my uncle's farm,
became a reproach even in my eyes, so that when I visited it for the
last time just before our removal to Iowa, I, too, was a little ashamed
of it. Its disorder did not diminish my regard for the owner, but I
wished he would clean out the stable and prop up the wagon-shed.

My grandmother's death came soon after our second visit to the
homestead. I have no personal memory of the event, but I heard Uncle
David describe it. The setting of the final scene in the drama was
humble. The girls were washing clothes in the yard and the silent old
mother was getting the mid-day meal. David, as he came in from the
field, stopped for a moment with his sisters and in their talk Samantha
said: "Mother isn't at all well today."

David, looking toward the kitchen, said, "Isn't there some way to keep
her from working?"

"You know how she is," explained Deborah. "She's worked so long she
don't know how to rest. We tried to get her to lie down for an hour but
she wouldn't."

David was troubled. "She'll have to stop sometime," he said, and then
they passed to other things, hearing meanwhile the tread of their
mother's busy