My first book, published anonymously, made a good enough success to warrant my writing a novel. Uncle Sam, as usual the deus ex machina, decided where the scene of the future novel should be laid, by sending me to California to pass the summer with my Aunt Annie Mailliard.
After my return from California I tried to preserve something of all that I had seen and learned of that wonder country in a novel, the “San Rosario Ranch.”
It was in these years that I met Margaret and Lorin Deland, to whom I was drawn from the first, by a strong sympathy. The Delands were then living at Number 112 Mt. Vernon Street, a small house they had fitted up picturesquely, whose chief feature was a diminutive living room and an immense fireplace. Here, whenever there was the slightest excuse, a fire of enormous birch
HENRY MARION HOWE, SC.D., LL.D.
CHEVALIER DE LA LÉGION D’HONNEUR, KNIGHT OF THE ORDER OF ST. STANISLAS
PROFESSOR OF METALLURGY IN COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY
From the portrait by Font
logs blazed on the hearth. Phillips Brooks, who was one of their intimates, spent many evenings sitting over the wood fire. As the Delands’ fortunes improved, owing to Lorin’s original and brilliant work in what was then the new field of advertising and business counsel, they bought a more expensive house, Number 76 Mt. Vernon Street. When they moved, the ashes from the big fireplace at Number 112 were carefully collected and transported to the new house. The strong resemblance between Margaret and myself was often noticed. People said she looked like another of the Howe sisters. The resemblance was far deeper than this, for from the beginning of our acquaintance, I felt that she was like one of ourselves. Margaret, who did not remember her own mother, had a deep sympathy for mine. She often signed her letters, “Your abandoned Spring-off,” and declared that she was in reality my mother’s daughter, and had been abandoned in infancy on the doorsteps of her excellent Aunt and Uncle Campbell, the only parents she ever knew.