Annals of our ancestors; one hundred and fifty years of history in the ...

JOSEPH RAY WATKINS 297
When Grace was born we were living at Pleasant Grove,
Minnesota, about forty miles from Plainview, and we drove
over to see the baby- It was a pleasant journey with a good
team of horses on a day in spring, and we found the little darkeyed
baby all that could be desired. As I looked at her
in her mother's arms I did not dream she was to be the
one to suggest to me the writing of our annals and to
make this very book a possibility. She was certainly a
beam of bright sunshine in her home. The muslin tent on the
lawn, her playhouse when she was a child, her dolls and her
dishes and her little friends to dine with her,— these are only
memories now, but they tell of a happy little girl who was a
bright playmate for those she selected as her friends, and from
the very beginning she was loyal to such. By her orders the
muslin tent of which I have spoken was erected upon the lawn,
and there only her special friends were entertained; for, like
her mother, she preferred to chose her own friends, and to
them she would be constant.
Mary Ellen loved flowers, and I can yet see how she used
to visit her garden after the sun had set on summer days and
note the new varieties or fresh blossoms that had opened during
the day. Years afterward she told me of the happiness she
had felt when with her babies in that little garden at the back
of the house, little Georgie B. in her arms and Grace clinging
to her skirts. She recalled how sweet it was to pass between
the rows of blooming plants, with the evening air full of fragrance
and her babies seeming to enjoy all with her. How full
of life and hope we all were then!
Sad indeed was that day, February 25, 1881, when Georgie
B. straightened himself out in his father's arms in a spasm,
and passed from one convulsion to another till his little bruised
form grew still in death. He was named for his two grandfathers,
George Benjamin, and he was but fourteen months
old when he died. His birthday was just the day after Christmas
in 1879. I have in the house, after thirty-one years, a
letter from our father's second wife, telling of the sorrowful
time of his death, of the newly fallen snow that came so heavily
and so rapidly that it blocked the railroad so they had difficulty
in reaching Plainview from a point not far distant.