I remember that she usually wore a red cashmere shawl about her shoulders, and that she always had on an old-fashioned cap trimmed with green ribbons.

There was something very modest and gentle and pleasing about her still graceful little body.
Her room, where I liked to come to play because it was so large and sunny, was furnished as simply as a Presbyterian parsonage: the waxed walnut furniture was of the Directory period, the large bed had a canopy of thick, red, cotton stuff and the walls were painted an ochre yellow; and upon them in gilt frames, slightly tarnished, were hung water colors representing vases of flowers.

I very soon discovered that this room was furnished in a very simple and old-fashioned way, and I thought to myself that the good old grandmother who sang so constantly must be much poorer than my other grandmother, who was younger by twenty years, and who always dressed in black--which last matter seemed an elegant distinction to me.
But to return to my drawings! I think that the pictures of those two ducks, occupying such different stations in life, were the first I ever drew.
At the bottom of the picture called "The Happy Duck" I had drawn a tiny house, and near the duck himself there was a large, kind woman who was calling him to her so that she might give him food.
"The Unhappy Duck," on the other hand, was swimming about solitary and alone on a sort of hazy sea, which I had represented by drawing two or three straight lines, and in the distance one could see the outline of a gloomy shore.

The thin paper, a leaf torn from a book, had print on the reverse side, and the letters showed through in grayish flecks and gave the curious impression as of clouds in the sky.

And that little drawing, with less form than a school-boy's blackboard scrawl, was completely transfigured by those gray spots, and because of them it took on for me a deep and dreadful significance.