RECOLLECTIONS OF FULL YEARS
quently founded judgments on what he would jocosely criticise as "a woman's reason."
Judge Ide was born and bred a Vermonter and had many of the rugged characteristics of the Green Mountain State, not the least among which is a certain indefinable, but peculiarly New England caution. In addition to a large and active law practice in both New Hampshire and Vermont, he had banking connections through which he had gained a better knowledge of business and finance than is possessed by the average lawyer. Moreover, a long term as Chief Justice of Samoa had given him diplomatic experience and a knowledge of the Polynesian races which were to serve him well in his work in the Philippines. As Chief Justice he exercised diplomatic and consular as well as judicial functions, and his position brought him in close relations with the English and German officials of the joint protectorate of the Samoan islands and in constant social contact with the naval officers of many countries whose ships very frequently called at Apia. He was a widower with two young daughters.
These daughters, Anne and Marjorie, or "the two Ide girls" as they were then popularly known, displayed no sign of Puritan ancestry or upbringing. They were just remarkably beautiful and altogether charming and delightful. A large part of their girlhood had been spent in Samoa; they were the product of an intermittent, but very picturesque education, and there was ingrained in them some of that happy-go-lucky attitude toward life, and that freedom from useless convention which the Occidental is not unlikely to acquire in the Orient.
These girls had, in Samoa, been great friends of Robert Louis Stevenson. Anne, the elder, was the especial favourite of the beauty-loving invalid and he willed to her his birthday, as can be learned from his Samoan letters. She was born near Christmas time and had never known what it was
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