“I succeeded so well with my uncle that I thought I would try a course of cousins.  I had enough of them to furnish out a whole gallery of portraits.  There was cousin ‘Creeshy,’ as we called her; Lucretia, more correctly.  She was a cripple.  Her left lower limb had had something happen to it, and she walked with a crutch.  Her patience under her trial was very pathetic and picturesque, so to speak,—­I mean adapted to the tender parts of a story; nothing could work up better in a melting paragraph.  But I could not, of course, describe her particular infirmity; that would point her out at once.  I thought of shifting the lameness to the right lower limb, but even that would be seen through.  So I gave the young woman that stood for her in my story a lame elbow, and put her arm in a sling, and made her such a model of uncomplaining endurance that my grandmother cried over her as if her poor old heart would break.  She cried very easily, my grandmother; in fact, she had such a gift for tears that I availed myself of it, and if you remember old Judy, in my novel “Honi Soit” (Honey Sweet, the booksellers called it),—­old Judy, the black-nurse,—­that was my grandmother.  She had various other peculiarities, which I brought out one by one, and saddled on to different characters.  You see she was a perfect mine of singularities and idiosyncrasies.  After I had used her up pretty well, I came dawn upon my poor relations.  They were perfectly fair game; what better use could I put them to?  I studied them up very carefully, and as there were a good many of them I helped myself freely.  They lasted me, with occasional intermissions, I should say, three or four years.  I had to be very careful with my poor relations,—­they were as touchy as they could be; and as I felt bound to send a copy of my novel, whatever it might be, to each one of them,—­there were as many as a dozen,—­I took care to mix their characteristic features, so that, though each might suspect I meant the other, no one should think I meant him or her.  I got through all my relations at last except my father and mother.  I had treated my brothers and sisters pretty fairly, all except Elisha and Joanna.  The truth is they both had lots of odd ways,—­family traits, I suppose, but were just different enough from each other to figure separately in two different stories.  These two novels made me some little trouble; for Elisha said he felt sure that I meant Joanna in one of them, and quarrelled with me about it; and Joanna vowed and declared that Elnathan, in the other, stood for brother ’Lisha, and that it was a real mean thing to make fun of folks’ own flesh and blood, and treated me to one of her cries.  She was n’t handsome when she cried, poor, dear Joanna; in fact, that was one of the personal traits I had made use of in the story that Elisha found fault with.