A ("Nellie," her father's own child, never married, bread- 

 winner and War- worker) and Grace (Grace Elizabeth, de- 

 clared the business head of the menage) , there were now the 

 younger, Lillian (beauty, wit and musician of the family, to 

 become a missionary and a missionary's wife) , Sarah Almena 

 (generally known as "Minnie" and hating it) and Annie 

 Griffith (the family thorn; marrying early she had gone west 

 and written on stationery crested from one devil to another, 

 "The newspapers say that at Chgo Uni they sang the college 

 song the other day instead of the doxology. It wasn't true, I 

 suppose, but it probably did just as much good.") . And then 

 there was a brother, John Llewellyn (to become a rancher). 

 Because of the need for their more formalized education and 

 the importance, too, of getting each to rest more democrati- 

 cally upon his own feet (many a missionary has stressed the 

 "ruination" of his offspring wrought by the attentions of too 

 many "native" servants), the father brought the brood to 

 America. 



To make the hegira possible, he had obtained for himself 

 promise of a place with the American tract society. For a 

 year the family fortunes centred in Leroy, New York, where 

 all the children went to a public school. From here the now 

 fourteen-year-old William was permitted to search out the 

 relatives who had remained in Pennsylvania. This episode vis- 

 ited upon him a disillusionment which he never forgot. Back 

 in the compound in India, he had been told of the Revolu- 

 tionary sword that his grandfather had carried, and how, when 

 he himself went to the United States, it would be his. Demand- 

 ing what was his patrimony, he discovered that the good 

 burghers had converted its steel into three pig-sticking knives. 

 Perhaps it was this desecration of the ancient that subsequently 

 made him hate all antiques. When grandfather's clock and 

 other bits of old Pennsylvania became his, he stored them in a 

 leaking barn. 



After the father had been made the district secretary of the 

 Society, he moved his band to Chicago, more specifically to a 

 suburb thereof known as River Forest. Here the elder Wherry 

 built a house (278 Ashland Avenue) which was for many 

 years to function as one of the permanent post-office addresses 

 of the always widely scattered family. It was from here that 



