CHILDHOOD AND YOUTH 25 



remembers her as a wife, but she was undoubtedly a 

 most loving and dutiful one; and a more tender and 

 devoted mother could not be. As a young woman, I 

 imagine that she must have been beautiful. As an old 

 one, she was still strikingly handsome. She survived her 

 husband forty years, but never changed from her deep 

 widow's weeds, and, in spite of her attractions of mind 

 and person, she was so truly a widow indeed that a suitor 

 would hardly have dared to approach her, any more than 

 if her husband had been living. She was an excellent 

 housekeeper; and, both in the days of strict economy, 

 when her table was, of necessity, a very simple one, and 

 later on, when more abundant means enabled her to 

 gratify her hospitable instincts in setting the best before 

 her guests, everything was perfect of its kind. Her 

 nieces and nephews looked upon her house as a second 

 home, where they were perhaps allowed even greater 

 liberty by their gentle and indulgent aunt than in their 

 own. Her daughters, in referring to this, speak of the 

 remarkable fact that her kitchen, although clean and neat 

 as wax, was ' the place where all the boys of the family 

 felt at liberty to come and clean their guns.' The nephews 

 and nieces, who still survive, speak of 'Aunty Baird' with 

 almost as much tenderness as do her own children. 



"My grandmother was one of five children, she being 

 the eldest. She was a native of Philadelphia, and her 

 mother, Mrs. Biddle, was left a widow when the five 

 children were quite young. The next younger sister to 

 my grandmother married the Hon. Charles Penrose, a 

 lawyer, afterwards well known in State politics and at 

 one time Solicitor of the United States Treasury. At the 

 commencement of his career as a lawyer, he was advised 

 to open an office in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, and accord- 



