Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III. Heredity is a word to conjure with. We all like to trace the ancestral line and discover, or think we discover, the laws and the cause of this or that in the personages we are studying or commemorating. We say of A. as he becomes illustrious, "He comes of good stock," forgetful to say the same of B., his obscure and very indifferent brother. "Blood will tell," but so will some things else, and it were well for us amid our wise rules to leave abundant room for the play of environment, and above all, of will, human and divine. It may safely be taken for granted that the Goldwin genealogy is not conspicuously interesting to the general reader. Nor is it important to calculate just how many Welsh or Scottish or French or Dutch corpuscles swell the veins of the Goldwins. Suffice it for our purpose, that for a few moments we go back to Mr. John Goldwin's childhood and parental home. Mrs. Sarah Hulburd Goldwin and her little family, having breakfasted, passed into the sitting room and she took down her Bible from the clock shelf for the customary morning worship. She took her favorite seat by the window which admitted the light directly upon the Scripture pages and where the raysseemed fondly to mingle their gleam with the silver which was cresting the waves of her dark hair. For a moment, her Bible unopened, she fed her spirit from the holy pages God had written in the scene without It was a westward prospect; in the near foreground Lake Champlain; on the further shore the height where slumbered the ruins of Fort Ticonderoga, and in the distance, rising as guardian sentinels, the turrets and domes of the Adirondacks. "The strength of the hills is His," her soul whispered and reposed in the strength of the Eternal Love. Beside her sat three boys, the manly and judic...