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Aunt Sarah's father, Samuel Seabrooke, seems to have possessed no weakness whatsoever except a desire to stray away from home. He had impressed her completely with his perfection, until her recollection of him was as coolly symmetrical and as stilted as the copperplate calligraphy in the diary which he kept of his travels, and as impersonal as many of his statements in it concerning the wind velocity and the weather. Considering the chances he had of seeing interesting places, his observations have recently seemed to me surprisingly obvious.

"It is difficult and not infrequently painful," he wrote once, "to make headway against the westerly gales in the vicinity of Cape Horn."

"The yellow fever," he observed again, "carries off many in Havana every year."

"The native population of the city of Canton," he also recorded, "is very dense."

Aunt Sarah never explained, and certainly no one else can, what induced her father to take over Wickford Point in the early eighteen hundreds and to settle his son, his wife and his three daughters on the farm, unless he may have enjoyed contemplating the peace of Wickford Point when he was away from it. Like some of his descendants, he was away from it a great deal. Aunt Sarah often intimated that he was a "great gentleman," and various legal papers such as title deeds confirm her estimate.