in art, above all a gentleness of temperament and of manner.  These qualities he held in common with his mother.  On his father’s side Page was undiluted English; on his mother’s he was French and English.  Her father was John Samuel Raboteau, the descendant of Huguenot refugees who had fled from France on the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes; her mother was Esther Barclay, a member of a family which gave the name of Barclaysville to a small town half way between Raleigh and Fayetteville, North Carolina.  It is a member of this tribe to whom Page once referred as the “vigorous Barclay who held her receptions to notable men in her bedroom during the years of her bedridden condition.”  She was the proprietor of the “Half Way House,” a tavern located between Fayetteville and Raleigh; and in her old age she kept royal state, in the fashion which Page describes, for such as were socially entitled to this consideration.  The most vivid impression which her present-day descendants retain is that of her fervent devotion to the Southern cause.  She carried the spirit of secession to such an extreme that she had the gate to her yard painted to give a complete presentment of the Confederate Flag.  Walter Page’s mother, the granddaughter of this determined and rebellious lady, had also her positive quality, but in a somewhat more subdued form.  She did not die until 1897, and so the recollection of her is fresh and vivid.  As a mature woman she was undemonstrative and soft spoken; a Methodist of old-fashioned Wesleyan type, she dressed with a Quaker-like simplicity, her brown hair brushed flatly down upon a finely shaped head and her garments destitute of ruffles or ornamentation.  The home which she directed was a home without playing cards or dancing or smoking or wine-bibbing or other worldly frivolities, yet the memories of her presence which Catherine Page has left are not at all austere.  Duty was with her the prime consideration of life, and fundamental morals the first conceptions which she instilled in her children’s growing minds, yet she had a quiet sense of humour and a real love of fun.

She had also strong likes and dislikes, and was not especially hospitable to men and women who fell under her disapproval.  A small North Carolina town, in the years preceding and following the Civil War, was not a fruitful soil for cultivating an interest in things intellectual, yet those who remember Walter Page’s mother remember her always with a book in her hand.  She would read at her knitting and at her miscellaneous household duties, which were rather arduous in the straitened days that followed the war, and the books she read were always substantial ones.  Perhaps because her son Walter was in delicate health, perhaps because his early tastes and temperament were not unlike her own, perhaps because he was her oldest surviving child, the fact remains that, of a family of eight, he was generally regarded as the child with whom she was especially sympathetic.