Shortly before school reopened, Georgia and I spent the day with cousin [Frances E. Bond]; and in relating to her various incidents of our life, we spoke of the embarrassment we had felt in class the day that Mr. White asked every pupil whose ancestors had fought in the war of the American Revolution to rise, and Georgia and I were the only ones who remained seated. My cousin regarded us a moment and then said:
"Your Grandfather Eustis, although a widow's only son, and not yet sixteen years of age, enlisted when the Revolutionary War began. He was a sentinel at Old South Church, and finally, a prisoner aboard the Count d'Estang."
She would have stopped there, but we begged for all she knew about our mother's people, so she continued, mingling advice with information:
"I would rather that you should not know the difference between their position in life and your own; yet, if you must know it, the Eustis and the Wheelwright families, from whom you are descended, are among the most substantial and influential of New England. Their reputation, however, is not a prop for you to lean on. They are on the Atlantic coast, you on the Pacific; so your future depends upon your own merit and exertions."
This revelation of lineage, nevertheless, was an added incentive to strive for higher things; an inheritance more enduring than our little tin box and black silk stockings which had belonged to mother.
An almost indescribable joy was mine when, at a gathering of the school children to do honor to the citizens who had inaugurated the system of public instruction in Sacramento, I beheld on the platform Captain John A. Sutter. Memories both painful and grateful were evoked. It was he who had first sent food to the starving travellers in the Sierra Nevada Mountains. It was he who had laid his hand on my head, when a forlorn little waif at the Fort, tenderly saying, "Poor little girl, I wish I could give back what you have lost!"
To me, [Captain Sutter] had long been the embodiment of all that was good and grand; and now I longed to touch his hand and whisper to him gratitude too sacred for strangers' ears. But the opportunity was withheld until riper years.
During our last term at school, Georgia's health was so improved that my life was more free of cares and aglow with fairer promises. Miss [Kate Robinson] and I were rivals for school honors, and I studied as I never had studied before, for in the history, physiology, and rhetoric classes, she pressed me hard. At the close of the session the record showed a tie. Neither of us would accept determination by lot, and we respectfully asked the Honorable Board of Education to withhold the medal for that year.
About this time Georgia and I enjoyed a rare surprise. On his return from business one day, Mr. Chamberlain announced that a distinguished-appearing young lawyer, [S.O. Houghton] by name, had stopped at the bank that afternoon, to learn our address and say that he would call in the evening. We, knowing that he was the husband of our "little cousin Mary," were anxious to meet him and to hear of her, whom we had not seen since our journey across the snow. He came that evening, and told us of the cozy home in San Jose to which he had taken his young wife, and of her wish that we visit them the coming July or August.