To speak of my nearer relatives is to remind myself how the contrast of Lewis and Hamilton dominated my whole early life.  It began, for me, with the grandparents.  Grandfather Lewis, deaf, slow-moving, humming his psalm chants, much concerned for his health and prone to remind the family that he would not be with them long, is contrasted with Grandmother Hamilton, the sharp-tongued, sharpwitted widow, full of heterodox opinions (even, to the scandal of the whole connection, a Home Ruler), every inch a Warren, indifferent to convention as only an old Southern Irish aristocrat could be, living alone in a large tumble-down house with half a hundred cats for company.  To how many an innocent conversational gambit did she reply, "You're talking great nonsense"?  Born a little later, she would, I think, have been a Fabian.  She met vague small talk with ruthless statements of ascertainable fact and well-worn maxims with a tart demand for evidence.  Naturally, people called her eccentric.  Coming down a generation I find the same opposition.  My father's elder brother "Uncle Joe," with his family of two boys and three girls, lived very close to us while we were at the Old House.  His younger son was my earliest friend, but we drifted apart as we grew older.  Uncle Joe was both a clever man and a kind, and especially fond of me.  But I remember nothing that was said by our elders in that house; it was simply "grown-up" conversation - about people, business, politics, and health, I suppose.  But "Uncle Gussie" - my mother's brother, A. W. Hamilton - talked to me as if we were of an age.  That is, he talked about Things.  He told me all the science I could then take in, clearly, eagerly, without silly jokes and condescensions, obviously liking it as much as I did.  He thus provided the intellectual background for my reading of H. G. Wells.  I do not suppose he cared for me as a person half so much as Uncle Joe did; and that (call it an injustice or not) was what I liked.  During these talks our attention was fixed not on one another but on the subject.  His Canadian wife I have already mentioned.  In her also I found what I liked best - an unfailing, kindly welcome without a hint of sentimentality, unruffled good sense, the unobtrusive talent for making all things at all times as cheerful and comfortable as circumstances allowed.  What one could not have one did without and made the best of it.  The tendency of the Lewises to reopen wounds and to rouse sleeping dogs was unknown to her as to her husband.