Quem di diligunt, adolescens moritur....

My little grandmother had just begun the final, fatal descent of her life into alcoholism and senile dementia when I went to live with her in the fall and winter of my eighth year--and though I no longer quite fit in her lap, she accommodated a lonely little boy as best she could, and went on telling me, and retelling me, as she had always done, the long story of her life, dwelling largely on her childhood and young womanhood.

The youngest of twelve children, divided like the Olympian divinities, into half boys and half girls, my grandmother, Alice Effie (née Moore, in 1882), had the relative good fortune to have been born after the hard work and trial misfortunes of her parents' early settling into life in the Far West had been accomplished, and they had begun, by all accounts, to enjoy a comfortable, even--for the times and circumstances--fairly genteel existence.  The "Musical Moores," as great-grandfather Moses Moore and his sons were called (the epithet seems never to have been applied to his wife, great-grandmother Ellen, née Rockhill), lived in a large, ugly house with room for all those children, furnished with the belongings they had managed to save from the ruin of the Civil War, and brought West in what must have been a Spanish Armada of a wagon train, and included great-grandfather Moses' pride and joy, a parlor (reed) organ, shipped from Chicago by rail, and then by buckboard, which formed the principal musical element of the three (or four)-day dancing parties for which the Moores were admired and esteemed throughout the Territory.