My mother's people were English and she had no relatives on this side of the water. Father belonged to a huge family, all of them great visitors, but so far as I knew, no children among them. All kinds of old maids: rich and poor, gentle and stern, soft and hard, big and little, they all managed once a year to pay their dear cousin, Dr. Allison, a visit at Bracken. I did not mind their coming. The soft ones seemed to have been little girls once, which was something. I used to think when I was quite a little thing that the hard ones must have been little boys, because of the statement in my Mother Goose that little boys were made of "Snaps and snails and puppy dog tails,"--not nice soft collie pups' tails, either, but the tight, hard kind that grew on Cousin Park Garnett's pug.