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Show 12 was disgusted sometimes with myself, but it was partly from being bashful, so I readily identified with that nit-wit, Sweet Alice Ben Bolt, who "laughed with delight when you gave her a smile, but trembled with fear at your frown. " Thomas Roscoe, although lost to my parents at one month, was always a part of our family. We visited his tiny grave and decorated it with paper flowers every decoration day, and Mama caressed the little marble headstone and wept. We knew his birthday, August 11, 1902, and always calculated how old he would have been if he had lived. He died of Diphtheria, the dread disease that wiped out whole families of children. Jim and Hulda Leavitt lost five little children inside of one week, and when we visited Tommy's grave, we also visited those of the Leavitt children. There were other children, one of whom, Lasca, was near my age and became my friend, but that was after I became a poet. "I was alone with my babe in the house when he passed away, " wrote Mama. "This was a terrible shock to me and made me very nervous about being on the farm so far from neighbors. Then in October, two months later, our dear little Eldon had a severe sick spell and we were afraid we would lose him. I lived in constant fear from then on. " Our farm was across the river and a little to the north of the town of Joseph, population then about three hundred or less. Our land was bisected by the railroad, which ran east of us on its run south to |