just before the panic in 1907, and rents were exorbitant. And from having seventy-five dollars spending money a month before I was married, I jumped to keeping two of us on sixty dollars, which was what was left after the rent was paid. I am not rationalizing when I say I am glad that we did not have a cent more. It was a real sporting event to make both ends meet! And we did it, and saved a dollar or so, just to show we could. Any and every thing we commandeered to help maintain our solvency. Seattle was quite given to food fairs in those days, and we kept a weather eye out for such. We would eat no lunch, make for the Food Show about three, nibble at samples all afternoon, and come home well-fed about eight, having bought enough necessities here and there to keep our consciences from hurting.

Much of the time Carl had to be on the road selling bonds, and we almost grieved our hearts out over that. In fact, we got desperate, and when Carl was offered an assistant cashiership in a bank in Ellensburg, Washington, we were just about to accept it, when the panic came, and it was all for retrenchment in banks. Then we planned farming, planned it with determination. It was too awful, those good-byes. Each got worse and harder than the last. We had divine days in between, to be sure, when we'd prowl out into the woods around the city, with a picnic lunch, or bummel along the waterfront, ending at a counter we knew, which produced, or the man behind it produced, delectable and cheap clubhouse sandwiches.

The bond business, and business conditions generally in the Northwest, got worse and worse. In March, after six months of Seattle, we were called back to the San Francisco office. Business results were better, Carl's salary was raised considerably, but there were still separations.

CHAPTER IV

On July 3, the Marvelous Son was born, and never was there such a father. Even the trained nurse, hardened to new fathers by years of experience, admitted that she never had seen any one take parenthood quite so hard. Four times in the night he crept in to see if the baby was surely breathing. We were in a very quiet neighborhood, yet the next day, being Fourth of July, now and then a pop would be heard. At each report of a cap-pistol a block away, Carl would dash out and vehemently protest to a group of scornful youngsters that they would wake our son. As if a one-day-old baby would seriously consider waking if a giant fire-cracker went off under his bed!

Those were magic days. Three of us in the family instead of two—and separations harder than ever. Once in all the ten and a half years we were married I saw Carl Parker downright discouraged over his own affairs, and that was the day I met him down town in Oakland and he announced that he just could not stand the bond business any longer. He had come to dislike it heartily as a business; and then, leaving the boy and me was not worth the whole financial world put together. Since his European experience,—meeting the Webbs and their kind,—he had had a hankering for University work, but he felt that the money return was so small he simply could not contemplate raising a family on it. But now we were desperate. We longed for a life that would give us the maximum chance to be together. Cold-bloodedly we decided that University work would give us that opportunity, and the long vacations would give us our mountains.

The work itself made its strong appeal, too. Professor Henry Morse Stephens and Professor Miller of the University of California had long urged Carl to go into teaching; and at last we decided that, even if it meant living on husks and skimmed milk all our days, at least we would be eating what there was to eat together, three meals a day every day. We cashed in our savings, we drew on everything there was to draw on, and on February 1, 1909, the three of us embarked for Harvard—with fifty-six dollars and seventy-five cents excess-baggage to pay at the depot, such young ignoramuses we were.

That trip East was worth any future hardship we might have reaped. Our seven-months-old baby was one of the young saints of the world—not once in the five days did he peep. We'd pin him securely in the lower berth of our compartment for his nap, and back we would fly to the corner of the rear platform of the observation car, and gloat, just gloat, over how we had come into the inheritance of all creation. We owned the world. And I, who had never been farther from my California home town than Seattle, who never had seen real snow, except that Christmas when we spent four days at the Scenic Hot Springs in the Cascades, and skied and sledded and spilled around like six-year-olds! But stretches and stretches of snow! And then, just traveling, and together!

And to be in Boston! We took a room with a bath in the Copley Square Hotel. The first evening we arrived, Nandy (Carleton, Jr.) rolled off the bed; so when we went gallivanting about Boston, shopping for the new home, we left him in the bath-tub where he could not fall out. We padded it well with pillows, there was a big window letting in plenty of fresh air, and we instructed the chambermaid to peep at him now and then. And there we would leave him, well-nourished and asleep. (By the time that story had been passed around by enough people in the home town, it developed that one day the baby—just seven months old, remember—got up and turned on the water, and was found by the chambermaid sinking for the third time.)

Something happened to the draft from the home bank, which should have reached Boston almost at the same time we did. We gazed into the family pocket-book one fine morning, to find it, to all intents and purposes, empty. Hurried meeting of the finance committee. By unanimous consent of all present, we decided—as many another mortal in a strange town has decided—on the pawnshop. I wonder if my dear grandmother will read this—she probably will. Carl first submitted his gold watch—the baby had dropped it once, and it had shrunk thereby in the eyes of the pawnshop man, though not in ours. The only other valuable we had along with us was my grandmother's wedding present to me, which had been my grandfather's wedding present to her—a glorious old-fashioned breast-pin. We were allowed fifty dollars on it, which saved the day. What will my grandmother say when she knows that her bridal gift resided for some days in a Boston pawnshop?

We moved out to Cambridge in due time, and settled at Bromley Court, on the very edge of the Yard. We thrilled to all of it—we drank in every ounce of dignity and tradition the place afforded, and our wild Western souls exulted. We knew no one when we reached Boston, but our first Sunday we were invited to dinner in Cambridge by two people who were, ever after, our cordial, faithful friends—Mr. and Mrs. John Graham Brooks. They made us feel at once that Cambridge was not the socially icy place it is painted in song and story. Then I remember the afternoon that I had a week's wash strung on an improvised line back and forth from one end of our apartment to the other. Just as I hung the last damp garment, the bell rang, and there stood an immaculate gentleman in a cutaway and silk hat, who had come to call—an old friend of my mother's. He ducked under wet clothes, and we set two chairs where we could see each other, and yet nothing was dripping down either of our necks; and there we conversed, and he ended by inviting us both to dinner—on Marlborough Street, at that! He must have loved my mother very dearly to have sought further acquaintance with folk who hung the family wash in the hall and the living-room and dining-room. His house on Marlborough Street! We boldly and excitedly figured up on the way home, that they spent on the one meal they fed us more than it cost us to live for two weeks—they honestly did.

Then there was the dear "Jello" lady at the market. I wish she would somehow happen to read this, so as to know that we have never forgotten her. Every