The picture of mother and son in those early days is an altogether charming one.  Page’s mother was only twenty-four when he was born; she retained her youth for many years after that event, and during his early childhood, in appearance and manner, she was little more than a girl.  When Walter was a small boy, he and his mother used to take long walks in the woods, sometimes spending the entire day, fishing along the brooks, hunting wild flowers, now and then pausing while the mother read pages of Dickens or of Scott.  These experiences Page never forgot.  Nearly all his letters to his mother—­to whom, even in his busiest days in New York, he wrote constantly—­have been accidentally destroyed, but a few scraps indicate the close spiritual bond that existed between the two.  Always he seemed to think of his mother as young.  Through his entire life, in whatever part of the world he might be, and however important was the work in which he might be engaged, Page never failed to write her a long and affectionate letter at Christmas.

“Well, I’ve gossiped a night or two”—­such is the conclusion of his Christmas letter of 1893, when Page was thirty-eight, with a growing family of his own—­“till I’ve filled the paper—­all such little news and less nonsense as most gossip and most letters are made of.  But it is for you to read between the lines.  That’s where the love lies, dear mother.  I wish you were here Christmas; we should welcome you as nobody else in the world can be welcomed.  But wherever you are and though all the rest have the joy of seeing you, which is denied to me, never a Christmas comes but I feel as near you as I did years and years ago when we were young. (In those years big fish bit in old Wiley Bancom’s pond by the railroad:  they must have been two inches long!)—­I would give a year’s growth to have the pleasure of having you here.  You may be sure that every one of my children along with me will look with an added reverence toward the picture on the wall that greets me every morning, when we have our little Christmas frolics—­the picture that little Katharine points to and says ’That’s my grandmudder.’—­The years, as they come, every one, deepen my gratitude to you, as I better and better understand the significance of life and every one adds to an affection that was never small.  God bless you.

     “Walter.”

* * * * *

Such were the father and mother of Walter Hines Page; they were married at Fayetteville, North Carolina, July 5, 1849; two children who preceded Walter died in infancy.  The latter was born at Cary, August 15, 1855.  Cary was a small village which Frank Page had created; in honour of the founder it was for several years known as Page’s Station; the father himself changed the name to Cary, as a tribute to a temperance orator who caused something of a commotion in the neighbourhood in the early seventies.  Cary was not then much of a town and has not since