not take my eyes away.
I had never thought my father's face a beautiful one until then, but I
believe it must have been so, always.

I know that he was a studious man, fond of what was called "solid
reading." He delighted in problems of navigation (he was for many years
the master of a merchant-vessel sailing to various European ports), in
astronomical calculations and historical computations. A rhyming genius
in the town, who undertook to hit off the peculiarities of well-known
residents, characterized my father as

"Philosophic Ben,
Who, pointing to the stars, cries, Land ahead!"

His reserved, abstracted manner,--though his gravity concealed a fund
of rare humor,--kept us children somewhat aloof from him; but my
mother's temperament formed a complete contrast to his. She was chatty
and social, rosy-cheeked and dimpled, with bright blue eyes and soft,
dark, curling hair, which she kept pinned up under her white lace
cap-border. Not even the eldest child remembered her without her cap,
and when some of us asked her why she never let her pretty curls be
visible, she said,--

"Your father liked to see me in a cap. I put it on soon after we were
married, to please him; I always have worn it, and I always shall wear
it, for the same reason."

My mother had that sort of sunshiny nature which easily shifts to
shadow, like the atmosphere of an April day. Cheerfulness held sway
with her, except occasionally, when her domestic cares grew too
overwhelming; but her spirits rebounded quickly from discouragement.

Her father was the only one of our grandparents who had survived to my
time,--of French descent, piquant, merry, exceedingly polite, and very
fond of us children, whom he was always treating to raisins and
peppermints and rules for good behavior. He had been a soldier in the
Revolutionary War,--the greatest distinction we could imagine. And he
was also the sexton of the oldest church in town,--the Old South,--and
had charge of the winding-up of the town clock, and the ringing of the
bell on week-days and Sundays, and the tolling for funerals,--into
which mysteries he sometimes allowed us youngsters a furtive glimpse. I
did not believe that there was another grandfather so delightful as
ours in all the world.

Uncles, aunts, and cousins were plentiful in the family, but they did
not live near enough for us to see them very often, excepting one aunt,
my father's sister, for whom I was named. She was fair, with