ncee. Her father, Colonel MacClanahan, a man of six feet five
inches in height, had been Judge Advocate General on the Staff of
Braxton Bragg and had fought under General Robert E. Lee. He was a
Southerner of Scotch extraction, having been born and brought up in
Tennessee. A lawyer by training, after the war, when everything that
belonged to him was destroyed in the "reconstruction period," and
being still a very young man, he had gone North to Chicago and begun
life again at his profession. There he met and married, in 1884, Miss
Rosamond Hill, who was born in Burlington, Vermont, but who, since
childhood and the death of her parents, had lived with her married
sister, Mrs. Charles Durand, of Chicago. The MacClanahans had two
children--the boy, Kinloch, dying at an early age as the result of an
accident. Colonel MacClanahan himself died a few months later, leaving
a widow and one child, Anna Elizabeth Caldwell MacClanahan. She and
her mother had lived the greater part of the time with Mrs. Durand,
who died something more than a year before our engagement.

The friends with whom my fiancee had been travelling were almost
next-door neighbours in Lake Forest. They made my short stay doubly
happy by endless kindnesses; and all through the years, till his death
in 1918, Mr. Stirling gave me not only a friendship which meant more
to me than I can express, but his loving and invaluable aid and
counsel in our work.

In spite of my many years of sailor life, I found that I was expected
among other things to ride a horse, my fiancee being devoted to that
means of progression. The days when I had ridden to hounds in England
as a boy in Cheshire stood me in some little stead, for like swimming,
tennis, and other pastimes calling for coordination, riding is never
quite forgotten. But remembering Mr. Winkle's experiences, it was not
without some misgivings that I found a shellback like myself galloping
behind my lady's charger. My last essay at horseback riding had been
just eleven years previously in Iceland. Having to wait a few days at
Reikkavik, I had hired a whole bevy of ponies with a guide to take
myself and the young skipper of our vessel for a three days' ride to
see the geysers. He had never been on the back of any animal before,
and was nevertheless not surprised or daunted at falling off
frequently, though an interlude of being dragged along with one foot
in the stirrup over lava beds made no little impression upon him.