RICHARD SOUTHGATE 19 



where they with the wagon were swept away and lost. An effort 

 was made to raise a subscription to help the fellow out of his 

 difficulties. My grandfather not only refused to give any money 

 for this purpose, but dismissed the idea for the reason that it 

 publicly approved the man's drunken ways. The subscription 

 failed, yet to the surprise of the neighborhood the man was 

 supplied with four horses and a wagon. It was found out that 

 Richard Southgate had contrived in a round-about way, at his 

 own cost, to make good the loss. By this adroit device he stuck 

 to his principles of not rewarding negligence and his axiom of 

 "not letting your right hand know what your left does." I 

 should like to tell far more of this interesting man, but some- 

 thing of his unusual ways will be set forth in the slender per- 

 sonal narrative of my youth. 



I have been unable to find anything concerning the collateral 

 ancestors on my grandfather's side. What he had of distinction 

 appears to have come through his father from the old country ; 

 though through his wife, my maternal grandmother, there came 

 an interesting group of inheritances. This woman was evidently 

 a person of more than usual fineness of character. She died of 

 cholera ten years before I was born, but her name lived after, 

 so that as a lad, going about in a wide range of northern and 

 central Kentucky, I found a welcome as her grandchild, and a 

 warm place in the hearts of all sorts of people whom she had 

 cheered and befriended in the days when as the throng from 

 Virginia to the frontier were coming in there was need of mutual 

 help. She must have been a woman of uncommon vigor, for she 

 was the efficient mistress of a great household, one that held 

 many slaves, and a host of poor kin, who swarmed upon any 

 successful pioneers who had made a place in the new land. She 

 seems to have thought nothing of horseback journeys of fifty 

 or a hundred miles to help those who needed her cheer. 



The qualities which made my grandmother a large figure in 

 her time and place, came from her father, Dr. John Hinde, a 

 London man, long a surgeon in the British navy, who in middle 



