It is with a kind of fear that I begin to write the history of my life. I have, as it were, a superstitious hesitation in lifting the veil that gs about my childhood like a golden mist. The task of writing an autobiography is a difficult one. When I try to classify my earliest impressions, I find that fad fancy look alike across the years that link the past with the present. The aints the childs experiences in her own fantasy. A few impressions stand out vividly from the first years of my life; but "the shadows of the prison-house are on the rest." Besides, many of the joys and sorrows of childhood have lost their poignancy; and many is of vital importan my early education have been fotten in the excitement of great discoveries. In order, therefore, not to be tedious I shall try to present in a series of sketches only the episodes that seem to me to be the most iing and important.
I was born on June 27, 1880, in Tuscumbia, a little town of northern Alabama.
The family on my fathers side is desded from Caspar Keller, a native of Switzerland, who settled in Maryland. One of my Swiss aors was the first teacher of the deaf in Zurid wrote a book on the subject of their education--rather a singular ce; though it is true that there is no king who has not had a slave among his aors, and no slave who has not had a king among his.
My grandfather, Caspar Kellers soered" large tracts of land in Alabama and finally settled there. I have been told that once a year he went from Tuscumbia to Philadelphia on horseback to purchase supplies for the plantation, and my aunt has in her possession many of the letters to his family, which give charming and vivid ats of these trips.
My Grandmother Keller was a daughter of one of Lafayettes aides, Alexander Moore, and granddaughter of Alexander Spotswood, an early ial Governor of Virginia. She was also sed cousin to Robert E. Lee.
My father, Arthur H. Keller, tain in the federate Army, and my mother, Kate Adams, was his sed wife and many years younger. Her grandfather, Benjamin Adams, married Susanna E. Goodhue, and lived in Newbury, Massachusetts, for many years. Their son, Charles Adams, was born in Newburyport, Massachusetts, and moved to Helena, Arkansas. When the Civil War broke out, he fought on the side of the South and became a brigadier-general. He married Lucy Hele, who beloo the same family of Everetts as Edward Everett and Dr. Edward Everett Hale. After the war was over the family moved to Memphis, Tennessee.
I lived, up to the time of the illhat deprived me of my sight and hearing, in a tiny house sisting of a large square room and a small one, in which the servant slept. It is a in the South to build a small house he homestead as an ao be used on occasion. Such a house my father built after the Civil War, and when he married my mother they went to live in it. It was pletely covered with vines, climbing roses and honeysuckles. From the garden it looked like an arbour. The little porch was hidden from view by a s of yellow roses and Southern smilax. It was the favourite haunt of humming-birds and bees.
The Keller homestead, where the family lived, was a few steps from our little rose-bower. It was called "Ivy Green" because the house and the surrounding trees and fences were covered with beautiful English ivy. Its old-fashioned garden was the paradise of my childhood.
Even in the days before my teacher came, I used to feel along the square stiff bo