THE STORY OF AN ENTOMOLOGIST 



that in addition to being a famous painter, he was greatly inter- 

 ested in raising ducks and he told me especially about the spoon- 

 bill variety. He said that their bills are so shaped that they skim 

 off things on or near the surface of the water and that in 

 this way they swallow many mosquito larvae. 



I am constantly reminding myself that this is "The Story of 

 an Entomologist," not the story of his family life, or of a lot of 

 other things that I have told about that might be thought 

 extraneous. But they will work in, and some of them, I am sure, 

 are fairly interesting. 



I have said that in 1886 I married, and I think I should say a 

 litde about this. I married a very charming girl who lived in 

 Washington and whose parents came originally from Maryland. 

 The bald facts are that I built a little house in Washington 

 Heights in which we lived for a time and then moved to old 

 Georgetown. My wife was very musical and so was I. For six 

 years we had no children, and then at intervals of four years 

 our three daughters were born, all in Georgetown. In 1901 we 

 moved back to northwest Washington and lived there for many 

 years. There has been almost nothing in our family life that would 

 be of interest to anyone but ourselves, but it has been a very 

 happy one. Mrs. Howard died in 1926, but the three daughters 

 are rather remarkable and very delightful and mean a great 

 deal to me. 



There is one thing, however, that rather stands out and that Is, 

 after our first daughter was born, we built a little summer house 

 in the Catskill Mountains in a community that has come to be 

 known as die Onteora Club. This colony was founded by an 

 aunt and an uncle of mine, Mrs. Candace Wheeler and Francis 

 B. Thurber. Of course this is the club spoken of in the preced- 

 ing anecdote about Mr. Wilton Lockwood. This summer home 



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