On July 3, the Marvelous Son was born, and never was there such a father.  Even the trained nurse, hardened to new fathers by years of experience, admitted that she never had seen any one take parenthood quite so hard.  Four times in the night he crept in to see if the baby was surely breathing.  We were in a very quiet neighborhood, yet the next day, being Fourth of July, now and then a pop would be heard.  At each report of a cap-pistol a block away, Carl would dash out and vehemently protest to a group of scornful youngsters that they would wake our son.  As if a one-day-old baby would seriously consider waking if a giant fire-cracker went off under his bed!

Those were magic days.  Three of us in the family instead of two—­and separations harder than ever.  Once in all the ten and a half years we were married I saw Carl Parker downright discouraged over his own affairs, and that was the day I met him down town in Oakland and he announced that he just could not stand the bond business any longer.  He had come to dislike it heartily as a business; and then, leaving the boy and me was not worth the whole financial world put together.  Since his European experience,—­meeting the Webbs and their kind,—­he had had a hankering for University work, but he felt that the money return was so small he simply could not contemplate raising a family on it.  But now we were desperate.  We longed for a life that would give us the maximum chance to be together.  Cold-bloodedly we decided that University work would give us that opportunity, and the long vacations would give us our mountains.

The work itself made its strong appeal, too.  Professor Henry Morse Stephens and Professor Miller of the University of California had long urged Carl to go into teaching; and at last we decided that, even if it meant living on husks and skimmed milk all our days, at least we would be eating what there was to eat together, three meals a day every day.  We cashed in our savings, we drew on everything there was to draw on, and on February 1, 1909, the three of us embarked for Harvard—­with fifty-six dollars and seventy-five cents excess-baggage to pay at the depot, such young ignoramuses we were.

That trip East was worth any future hardship we might have reaped.  Our seven-months-old baby was one of the young saints of the world—­not once in the five days did he peep.  We’d pin him securely in the lower berth of our compartment for his nap, and back we would fly to the corner of the rear platform of the observation car, and gloat, just gloat, over how we had come into the inheritance of all creation.  We owned the world.  And I, who had never been farther from my California home town than Seattle, who never had seen real snow, except that Christmas when we spent four days at the Scenic Hot Springs in the Cascades, and skied and sledded and spilled around like six-year-olds!  But stretches and stretches of snow!  And then, just traveling, and together!