Eighty Years and More

My mother had the military idea of government, but her children, like their grandfather, were disposed to assume the responsibility of their own actions; thus the ancestral traits in mother and children modified, in a measure, the dangerous tendencies in each. Our parents were as kind, indulgent, and considerate as the Puritan ideas of those days permitted, but fear, rather than love, of God and parents alike, predominated. Add to this our timidity in our intercourse with servants and teachers, our dread of the ever present devil, and the reader will see that, under such conditions, nothing but strong self-will and a good share of hope and mirthfulness could have saved an ordinary child from becoming a mere nullity.