22 NATHANIEL SOUTHGATE SHALER 



mother and her grandfather, John Hinde, came that simple 

 interest in my fellow human beings and a sense of duty to them, 

 which she so eminently possessed. In person, as I recall her at 

 the age of thirty, she was, with only moderate beauty, very at- 

 tractive from her noble motherliness. She inherited from the 

 Hinde stock the very English quality which came to perhaps half 

 the descendants of the merry doctor; the characteristics which 

 are summed up in the typical squire that solid simplicity 

 which is the foundation of all the best in the stock. Though 

 blessed with a good mind, my mother was singularly without 

 intellectual interests. She inherited nothing of her father's 

 quick, wide-ranging intelligence ; all her care, and it was great, 

 went to her household, her numerous kindred, and her limited 

 circle of friends. Her excellent, unbreakable judgment and keen 

 discernment never penetrated beyond this seemingly narrow 

 field which she made by her activities a great realm. Now and 

 then a flash of intelligence showed that she had large possibili- 

 ties of thought which in other social conditions would have 

 awakened, but which were effectively repressed by the narrow- 

 ing quality of the life of the time and place. 



This task of sketching my ancestry is in some ways the most 

 difficult that I have ever undertaken. To set forth what is 

 germane without touching on what is essentially private, or 

 perhaps is not illustrative, is hard to effect in a way to give the 

 result any value. The writer essentially finds that the nearer he 

 comes to his own time the greater his limitations ; for whatever 

 be his regard for history, he must have a thought for those now 

 living, who may be offended by over-much detail concerning 

 those who share with him in the lives he is depicting. I am glad 

 to say that there is nothing in all I know of the direct and col- 

 lateral kinship of my line, which I can fairly well trace for an 

 average of six generations, that needs be hidden. In all the host 

 there is not one, so far as I have learned, who has ever been 

 connected or even charged with other vice than fighting in a 

 fair kind of a way. There has been no instance of insanity or 



