He was well educated, and from his portrait a shrewd observer might divine in him a genteel taste for literature.  The fine features bear witness to the influence of an American environment, yet suggest the intellectual Englishman of Matthew Arnold’s time.  The face is distinguished, ascetic, the chestnut hair lighter and thinner than my own; the side whiskers are not too obtrusive, the eyes blue-grey.  There is a large black cravat crossed and held by a cameo pin, and the coat has odd, narrow lapels.  His habits of mind were English, although he harmonized well enough with the manners and traditions of a city whose inheritance was Scotch-Irish; and he invariably drank tea for breakfast.  One of my earliest recollections is of the silver breakfast service and egg-cups which my great-grandfather brought with him from Sheffield to Philadelphia shortly after the Revolution.  His son, Dr. Hugh Moreton Paret, after whom I was named, was the best known physician of the city in the decorous, Second Bank days.

My mother was Sarah Breck.  Hers was my Scotch-Irish side.  Old Benjamin Breck, her grandfather, undaunted by sea or wilderness, had come straight from Belfast to the little log settlement by the great river that mirrored then the mantle of primeval forest on the hills.  So much for chance.  He kept a store with a side porch and square-paned windows, where hams and sides of bacon and sugar loaves in blue glazed paper hung beside ploughs and calico prints, barrels of flour, of molasses and rum, all of which had been somehow marvellously transported over the passes of those forbidding mountains,—­passes we blithely thread to-day in dining cars and compartment sleepers.  Behind the store were moored the barges that floated down on the swift current to the Ohio, carrying goods to even remoter settlements in the western wilderness.

Benjamin, in addition to his emigrant’s leather box, brought with him some of that pigment that was to dye the locality for generations a deep blue.  I refer, of course, to his Presbyterianism.  And in order the better to ensure to his progeny the fastness of this dye, he married the granddaughter of a famous divine, celebrated in the annals of New England,—­no doubt with some injustice,—­as a staunch advocate on the doctrine of infant damnation.  My cousin Robert Breck had old Benjamin’s portrait, which has since gone to the Kinley’s.  Heaven knows who painted it, though no great art were needed to suggest on canvas the tough fabric of that sitter, who was more Irish than Scotch.  The heavy stick he holds might, with a slight stretch of the imagination, be a blackthorn; his head looks capable of withstanding many blows; his hand of giving many.  And, as I gazed the other day at this picture hanging in the shabby suburban parlour, I could only contrast him with his anaemic descendants who possessed the likeness.  Between the children of poor Mary Kinley,—­Cousin Robert’s daughter, and the hardy stock of the old country there is a gap indeed!