tons; and little frilled caps, with black velvet bows--although they
could not at that time have been over thirty.

Of my two aunts, one was the nearest approach to a saint that
I shall ever know, a saint and very handsome. The other a mon-
daine with a sharp tongue, who could turn a phrase. She was asked
whether the ballot would make women masculine and answered,
"It's never made the clergy so."

She referred to a lady's crossing her legs as, "a vulgar bar-room
attitude." One of my sisters inquired how she knew.

She skated beautifully, and I can see her now, with her muff
hung on a ribbon round her neck, skimming the surface of our
little pond.

Like most people who retain their interest, their vigor and their
charm in old age, my great aunt, Ellen Wilson, had had a romantic
youth. . . ."

This is an interesting idea of Alice's, and throws a light on
the changes that have occurred in personality, in the men and
women of a hundred years ago and those of today.

Something in the limitations and opportunities of the early
nineteenth century was conducive to romance. It was a man-
ner of life that brought out character and sharpened individu-
ality. Rigorous conventions spurred such character to action;
stern parents lent excitement to the breaking of iron bars.

Hardly a family of which I have any knowledge but had, up
to, say, 1890, a son or daughter who risked all for love or ad-
venture. Only the other day a friend sent me the last of the
letters from an old gentleman who was one of five sons who,
almost to a man, ran away to sea, landed in distant parts, never
to return. This particular old gentleman, a scholar and philoso-
pher, died in Japan two years ago, just in time to escape the
war.

As a girl of eighteen my great aunt Ellen Wilson had met her
fate at a ball given in New York in the winter of 1835. She was
wearing, she says in her diary, "a thin gauzy material of creamy
white, with deep fringes to give it lightness and grace," and her
hair fell in curls caught together in a Grecian band. After being led
out once by a young Irish Lord a second partner was presented to
her, a young man of whom she and all New York society had al-
ready heard. Recently returned to New York from Oxford he had
spent the preceding summer in Newport, a year of one of the many

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