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- 
