“I do not remember much about mamma.  It is strange, too, that I do not, because I was thirteen when she died; but I always loved papa best, and stayed all the time I could in his study.  Mamma was very pretty; the prettiest woman I ever saw; but I don’t know how it was, all her prettiness did not seem to make papa care about her.  He was a clergyman—­an Episcopal clergyman—­and his father and his father’s father had been too; so you see for three whole generations it had been all books and study in the family; but mamma’s father was a farmer, and mamma was stronger than papa; she liked to live in the country and be out of doors, which he hated.  I think I know now just how it all was; but it used to puzzle me till I grew up.  When I was sixteen, my Aunt Abby, papa’s sister, told me that mamma was said to be the most beautiful girl in the whole State, and that papa fell so in love with her when he was just out of college, that he came very near dying because his father did not wish them to be married.  Poor papa! it was just so always with him; he had such a poor feeble body that any trouble or worry made him ill.  I can see now that it was because he and all his family had been such scholars, and lived in the house, and sat still all their lives; their bodies were not good for anything:  and I am thankful enough that my body is like mamma’s; but I don’t know what good it would do me, either, if dear papa hadn’t taught me all his ways of seeing things and feeling things.  Mamma never seemed to care much about anything, except when Dick or Abby were sick, and she always used to go to sleep in church while papa was saying the most beautiful things; sometimes it used to make me almost hate her.  I hated everybody that didn’t listen to him.  But Aunt Abby said once that very few people could understand him, and that was the reason we never stayed long in one place.  People got tired of hearing him preach.  This made me so angry I did not speak to Aunt Abby for two years, except when I was obliged to.  But I see now that she was right.  As I read over papa’s sermons I see that they would seem very strange to common men and women.  He saw much more in every little thing than people generally do.  I used to tell him sometimes he ‘saw double,’ and he would sigh and say that the world was blind, and did not see half; he never could take any minute by itself; there was the past to cripple it and the future to shadow it.  Poor, poor papa!  I really think I have learned in a very strange way to understand his capacity for sadness.  I understand it by my own capacity for joy.  I often smile to think how I used to accuse him of seeing double, for it is the very thing which Robert says to me again and again when a sight or a sound gives me such intense pleasure that I can hardly bear it.  And I see that while I have nearly the same sensitiveness to all impressions from things or from people which he had, my body compels the impressions to be joyous.  This is what I owe mamma.  If papa could have been well and strong, he would have sung joy such as no poet has ever sung since suns began to shine.