By ANNA McCALEB

In the writings of Alice and Phoebe Cary are to be found many references which show how fondly they remembered the little brown house in which they were born. This house was on a farm in the Miami Valley in Ohio, eight miles north of Cincinnati. Alice was born April 26th, 1820, and Phoebe, September 24th, 1824, and there was one brother between them. Robert Gary, the father, was a kindly, gentle man, fond of reading, especially romances and poetry. The education for which he had so much longed he had been unable to obtain, and this made him quiet and diffident with strangers, although in his own family he was most loving and most companionable. Even the animals on the farm loved him, and the horses and cattle would follow him about watching for the kindly word and pat, or for the lump of salt or sugar which he was so certain to have for them. This Robert Cary was a descendant of Sir Robert Cary, a famous English knight of the time of Henry V, and Phoebe was always very proud of this ancestry of hers—so proud, in fact, that she had the Gary arms engraved on a seal ring.

It would seem that the enthusiastic admiration which the daughters all their life had for their mother was nothing beyond her deserts, for she seems to have been far from an ordinary woman. Despite the fact that she had nine children, and that she did the work for the entire family, she managed to keep up her interest in public affairs, and to read history, essays, biography and politics, as often as books on such subjects came to her hand.

In the little brown house with its overhanging cherry tree, which tapped the roof and scratched the attic window-panes, and with its sweetbrier under the window, the children lived a simple and happy life. Naturally in a family of this size they divided themselves into groups, and Alice and Phoebe, who in their later life were so inseparable, do not seem to have singled each other out as companions in their childhood. Alice's special comrade was her next older sister, Rhoda, Thom she persisted to her dying day in thinking of as the real genius of the family, while the constant playmate of the active Phoebe was her next younger brother. The children spent much time out-of- doors, gathering nuts and flowers in their season, and gaining that love of nature which stayed with them all their lives. As they grew older, they were sent to the district school, and were taught household tasks, Alice taking readily enough to housekeeping, while Phoebe became, even as a child, remarkably proficient with the needle.

The struggle to keep out of debt was a constant one with the Cary family, and Alice said long years afterward, "For the first fourteen years of my life it seemed as if there was actually nothing in existence but work." However, By 1832 family affairs had improved somewhat, and a new and larger house was built upon the farm. It seemed as if all the ill luck of the family dated from the building of the new house, in which they were never as happy as they had been in the little brown house.

When she was a woman, Alice told with perfect faith the "family ghost story," which concerned this new house. She said that just before the removal of the family to the new house, they were all driven to the shelter of the old house by a sudden and violent summer storm. As Alice herself stood at the window looking out, she exclaimed to her mother, "Why is Rhoda at the new house with baby Lucy, and why does she have the door open?"

They all looked, and all saw Rhoda standing in the doorway of the new house, with the baby in her arms.

"She was probably out with the child and took shelter in the nearest place when the storm came up," said the mother, and then she called loudly, "Rhoda!"

The figure in the doorway did not move, and in a few moments Rhoda came down from upstairs, where she had left little Lucy asleep, declaring that she had not been near the new house.

The family believed most sincerely that this was a warning of trouble to come, and certain it is that in 1833, within one month of each other, Rhoda and little Lucy died. Lucy had been Alice's special charge, as Rhoda had been her special companion, and the girl's heart was almost broken by this double loss. How deep and lasting her grief was may be seen from a remark that she made to one of her friends, speaking of Lucy's death.