A naval officer's family seldom has the same roof over its head
for long, and my early recollections range from the coast of
the Mediterranean to Annapolis and from Washington to Kan-
sas City, with the discomforts of interminable railway journeys
in day coaches in between.

Morristown, New Jersey, where my father was born, was
more my home than any other one place. There, in a large
eighteenth-century house surrounded by many acres of land
on which were scattered the houses of my uncles and aunts,
my remarkable grandmother ruled us, as she had two pre-
ceding generations, kindly, justly, but with a rod of iron. My
grandmother had nine children, seven of whom married. At
Thanksgiving dinner in Morristown, we once sat down to
eighty-three. "How near can a distant cousin be?" was a saying
in the family. It took Alice a long time to realize that whenever
I kissed a pretty woman it was one of my cousins.

The large family in the Old House and those around it,
dominated by one woman, living in a world of its own, be-
longed more to the matriarchal family life of American frontier
days. No one of us who lived under that regime but knew to
the full the strange mixture of piety and worldly wisdom and
autocracy of that tradition.

My grandmother kept a pile of paper-bound French novels
on a table by her bed. Heaven knows when she found time to
read with a great house to manage, full of children and grand-
children and a never-ending succession of household duties.
She and the other ladies in the house washed the good china
and glass, did all the dusting, kept the flower garden, put up
preserves, made candied rose leaves and orange peel and jars
of potpourri, pickled walnuts, elderberry wine, raspberry
shrub, and a fine, dry blackberry brandy. They hemstitched
and embroidered sheets and pillowcases, which were put away
in lavender.

She caught me reading Madame Bovary when I should have
been learning a collect. Scolding me, she added, "You must
read it some day." I started in on Flaubert as soon as I went to
school.

The house was heated by open fireplaces and pot stoves
and was bitterly cold. My hands, and a ring around my shoe
tops, were chapped and raw for months in the year. But Mor-

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