Samuel was but a shadowy
memory, in him had centered our parents' fondest hopes and aims. These,
naturally, were transferred to the younger, now the only son, and the
hope that mother, especially, held for him was strangely stimulated by
the remembrance of the mystic divination of a soothsayer in the years
agone. My mother was a woman of too much intelligence and force of
character to nourish an average superstition; but prophecies fulfilled
will temper, though they may not shake, the smiling unbelief of the most
hard-headed skeptic. Mother's moderate skepticism was not proof against
the strange fulfillment of one prophecy, which fell out in this wise:

To a Southern city, which my mother visited when a girl, there came a
celebrated fortune-teller, and led by curiosity, my mother and my aunt
one day made two of the crowd that thronged the sibyl's drawing-rooms.

Both received with laughing incredulity the prophecy that my aunt and
the two children with her would be dead in a fortnight; but the dread
augury was fulfilled to the letter. All three were stricken with
yellow fever, and died within less than the time set. This startling
confirmation of the soothsayer's divining powers not unnaturally
affected my mother's belief in that part of the prophecy relating to
herself that "she would meet her future husband on the steamboat by
which she expected to return home; that she would be married to him in a
year, and bear three sons, of whom only the second would live, but that
the name of this son would be known all over the world, and would one
day be that of the President of the United States." The first part of
this prophecy was verified, and Samuel's death was another link in the
curious chain of circumstances. Was it, then, strange that mother looked
with unusual hope upon her second son?

That 'tis good fortune for a boy to be only brother to five sisters is
open to question. The older girls petted Will; the younger regarded him
as a superior being; while to all it seemed so fit and proper that the
promise of the stars concerning his future should be fulfilled that
never for a moment did we weaken in our belief that great things were
in store for our only brother. We looked for the prophecy's complete
fulfillment, and with childish veneration regarded Will as one destined
to sit in the executive's chair.

My mother, always somewhat delicate, was so affected in health by
the shock of Samuel's death that a change of s