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merchant's office. He had an extraordinary
personality, responsi- ble no doubt for his rapid advancement in
business and also for
his becoming a member of the Somerset Club, a dyed-
in-the-wool organization that was not in the habit of admitting foreign
unknowns.
I have never heard the circumstances under which he met my
grandmother, Mary Fiske. Once when Gardiner was showing us around the
Concord Road house, which he had just renovated, my
grandfather pointed at a window in the front room and remarked, "There
used to be a bay window there and a horsehair sofa. That's where I sat
with your grandmother when I was courting her."
Before they met she had been receiving the attentions of
Winslow Homer. I think my grandfather must have been a little jealous
because, when he gave me a pencil drawing that Homer had done of my
grandmother, he explained that it was by an itinerant artist who had
become quite well known.
In their early married life my grandparents lived at 36 Com-monwealth
Avenue, Boston, a new and fancier house that my great-grandmother
indulged herself in after her husband's demise. Here my father, Brenton
H. Dickson, Jr. was born in 1867. Later they
moved into a house on Chestnut Street, and finally settled at 126
Marlborough Street. They spent their summers in Weston at Dudeville,
the old Fiske house on Concord Road.
My grandmother was sort of a fairy god-mother and she delighted in
spoiling her grandchildren by bringing them interest- ing
presents whenever she came to visit. Once a doll was being raffled at a
church fair in Wayland and my sister Mary wanted
it very badly. When my grandmother learned that only one |
