Saturday the three of us went to the market, and there was the Jello lady with her samples. The helpings she dished for us each time! She brought the man to whom she was engaged to call on us just before we left. I wonder if they got married, and where they are, and if she still remembers us. She used to say she just waited for Saturdays and our coming. Then there was dear Granny Jones, who kept a boarding-house half a block away. I do not remember how we came to know her, but some good angel saw to it. She used to send around little bowls of luscious dessert, and half a pie, or some hot muffins. Then I was always grateful also—for it made such a good story, and it was true—to the New England wife of a fellow graduate student who remarked, when I told her we had one baby and another on the way, "How interesting—just like the slums!"

We did our own work, of course, and we lived on next to nothing. I wonder now how we kept so well that year. Of course, we fed the baby everything he should have,—according to Holt in those days,—and we ate the mutton left from his broth and the beef after the juice had been squeezed out of it for him, and bought storage eggs ourselves, and queer butter out of a barrel, and were absolutely, absolutely blissful. Perhaps we should have spent more on food and less on baseball. I am glad we did not. Almost every Saturday afternoon that first semester we fared forth early, Nandy in his go-cart, to get a seat in the front row of the baseball grandstand. I remember one Saturday we were late, front seats all taken. We had to pack baby and go-cart more than half-way up to the top. There we barricaded him, still in the go-cart, in the middle of the aisle. Along about the seventh inning, the game waxed particularly exciting—we were beside ourselves with enthusiasm. Fellow onlookers seemed even more excited—they called out things—they seemed to be calling in our direction. Fine parents we were—there was Nandy, go-cart and all, bumpety-bumping down the grandstand steps.

I remember again the Stadium on the day of the big track meet. Every time the official announcer would put the megaphone to his mouth, to call out winners and time to a hushed and eager throng, Nandy, not yet a year old, would begin to squeal at the top of his lungs for joy. Nobody could hear a word the official said. We were as distressed as any one—we, too, had pencils poised to jot down records.

Carl studied very hard. The first few weeks, until we got used to the new wonder of things, he used to run home from college whenever he had a spare minute, just to be sure he was that near. At that time he was rather preparing to go into Transportation as his main economic subject. But by the end of the year he knew Labor would be his love. (His first published economic article was a short one that appeared in the "Quarterly Journal of Economics" for May, 1910, on "The Decline of Trade-Union Membership.") We had a tragic summer.

Carl felt that he must take his Master's degree, but he had no foreign language. Three terrible, wicked, unforgivable professors assured him that, if he could be in Germany six weeks during summer vacation, he could get enough German to pass the examination for the A.M. We believed them, and he went; though of all the partings we ever had, that was the very worst. Almost at the last he just could not go; but we were so sure that it would solve the whole A.M. problem. He went third class on a German steamer, since we had money for nothing better. The food did distress even his unfinicky soul. After a particularly sad offering of salt herring, uncooked, on a particularly rough day, he wrote, "I find I am not a good Hamburger German. The latter eat all things in all weather."

Oh, the misery of that summer! We never talked about it much. He went to Freiburg, to a German cobbler's family, but later changed, as the cobbler's son looked upon him as a dispensation of Providence, sent to practise his English upon. His heart was breaking, and mine was breaking, and he was working at German (and languages came fearfully hard for him) morning, afternoon, and night, with two lessons a day, his only diversion being a daily walk up a hill, with a cake of soap and a towel, to a secluded waterfall he discovered. He wrote a letter and a postcard a day to the babe and me. I have just re-read all of them, and my heart aches afresh for the homesickness that summer meant to both of us.

He got back two days before our wedding anniversary—days like those first few after our reunion are not given to many mortals. I would say no one had ever tasted such joy. The baby gurgled about, and was kissed within an inch of his life. The Jello lady sent around a dessert of sixteen different colors, more or less, big enough for a family of eight, as her welcome home.

About six weeks later we called our beloved Dr. J—— from a banquet he had long looked forward to, in order to officiate at the birth of our second, known as Thomas-Elizabeth up to October 17, but from about ten-thirty that night as James Stratton Parker. We named him after my grandfather, for the simple reason that we liked the name Jim. How we chuckled when my father's congratulatory telegram came, in which he claimed pleasure at having the boy named after his father, but cautioned us never to allow him to be nicknamed. I remember the boresome youth who used to call, week in week out,—always just before a meal,—and we were so hard up, and got so that we resented feeding such an impossible person so many times. He dropped in at noon Friday the 17th, for lunch. A few days later Carl met him on the street and announced rapturously the arrival of the new son. The impossible person hemmed and stammered: "Why—er—when did it arrive?" Carl, all beams, replied, "The very evening of the day you were at our house for lunch!" We never laid eyes on that man again! We were almost four months longer in Cambridge, but never did he step foot inside our apartment. I wish some one could have psycho-analyzed him, but it's too late now. He died about a year after we left Cambridge. I always felt that he never got over the shock of having escaped Jim's arrival by such a narrow margin.

And right here I must tell of Dr. J——. He was recommended as the best doctor in Cambridge, but very expensive. "We may have to economize in everything on earth," said Carl, "but we'll never economize on doctors." So we had Dr. J——, had him for all the minor upsets that families need doctors for; had him when Jim was born; had him through a queer fever Nandy developed that lasted some time; had him through a bad case of grippe I got (this was at Christmastime, and Carl took care of both babies, did all the cooking, even to the Christmas turkey I was well enough to eat by then, got up every two hours for three nights to change an ice-pack I had to have—that's the kind of man he was!); had him vaccinate both children; and then, just before we left Cambridge, we sat and held his bill, afraid to open the envelope. At length we gathered our courage, and gazed upon charges of sixty-five dollars for everything, with a wonderful note which said that, if we would be inconvenienced in paying that, he would not mind at all if he got nothing.

Such excitement! We had expected two hundred dollars at the least! We tore out and bought ten cents' worth of doughnuts, to celebrate. When we exclaimed to him over his goodness,—of course we paid the sixty-five dollars,—all he said was: "Do you think a doctor is blind? And does a man go steerage to Europe if he has a lot of money in the bank?" Bless that doctor's heart! Bless all doctors' hearts! We went through our married life in the days of our financial slimness, with kindness shown us by every doctor we ever had. I remember our Heidelberg German doctor sent us a bill for a year of a dollar and a half. And even in our more prosperous days, at Carl's last illness, with that good Seattle doctor calling day and night, and caring for me after Carl's death, he refused to send any bill for anything. And a little