CALVIN COOLIDGE
when I was six years old. He was a spare man over six feet tall, of a nature which caused people to confide in him, and of a character which made him a constant choice for public office. His mother and her family showed a marked trace of Indian blood, I never saw her, but he took me one time to see her sister, his very aged aunt, whom we found sitting in the chimney corner smoking a clay pipe.
This was so uncommon that I always remembered it. I thought tobacco was only for men, though I had seen old ladies outside our neighborhood buy snuff at the store.
He was an expert horseman and loved to raise colts and puppies. He kept peacocks and other gay-colored fowl and had a yard and garden filled with scarlet flowers. But he never cared to hunt or fish. He found great amusement in practical jokes and could entice a man into a nest of bees and make him think he went there of his own accord.
He and my grandmother brought up as their own children the boy and girl of his only sister, whose parents died when they were less than two years old. He made them no charge, but managed their in-
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