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

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ANNALS OF OUR ANCESTORS
measurements of the little one, even to the length of the baby's
foot; and then how he grieved when this loved babe, Paul
Watkins Truesdell, died at the age of one year.
One by one he welcomed his grandchildren as a special
boon to himself. Remember, Roderick and the two Williams
and Joseph Ray, Junior, and Helen and Robert and Donald
and Rosamond, that your grandfather, William Watkins,
accounted each a treasure beyond computmg! The babies,
Richard and Florence, would have been so many more added
delights to him. Keep in memory that he loved you all, and
wished nothing more than that you should honor an unstained
name and bless his house with sincere goodness and domestic
kindness. As he himself chose great themes for thought, he
would have you do the same. He has left record in a letter
to a niece: "Cultivate the graces of the heart, for the heart
is the best part of man."
I feel constrained to speak especially of the grandchild who
was as his own son, for Willie Truesdell was given over to him
by the hands of his little mother when they were loosening their
clasp on all of earth's joy and pain. The scholarly young
father, the brilliant young mother, gone, gone with the dew
of youth yet on their brows — surely this grandchild needed all
his grandparents could give him. How proudly would he
have watched the development of his grandchildren through
the years; each one he knew when babes was brightest and
best! When little William Benson, Paul's youngest son, was
first seen by him in 1898, he wrote me in November of that
year: "Florence and little William Benson are here. He is
a most sweet and beautiful babe — the .finest of the flock."
I wonder what he would have thought and said if he had lived
to see the telegram I saw last June. It was one sent by Paul
Watkins to Ernest King, just as the former was starting with
a family party to tour Europe. It was received June 15, 1912,
and was as follows:
Joe graduated to-day with highest honor and captured the three
highest prizes — fifty dollars for History, fifty dollars for highest
all around scholarship and character, also Harvard-Andover prize
of three hundred dollars' scholarship in Harvard to scholar of highest