HAS it not been said that once in a lifetime most of us succumb to the particular situation against which we have cultivated the strongest principles? If there be one such, among the possibilities to which a truly civilized career is liable, more than another objectionable to the writer of these words, the creation of autobiography has long been that one.

Yet, for that offense, once criminal to my taste, I find myself hereby about to become indictable; and do set my hand and seal, on this day of the recall of my dearest literary oath, in this year of eminent autobiographical examples, one thousand eight hundred and ninety-five.

"There is -----, who has written a charming series of personal reminiscences, and --------, and ---------.

"You might meet your natural shrinking by allowing yourself to treat especially of your literary life; including, of course, whatever went to form and sustain it."

"I suppose I might," I sigh. The answer is faint; but the deed is decreed. Shall I be sorry for it?

It is a gray day, on gray Cape Ann, as I write these words. The fog is breathing over the downs. The outside steamers shriek from off the Point, as they feel their way at live of noon, groping as though it were dead of night, and stars and coast lights all were smitten dark, and every pilot were a stranger to his chart.

A stranger to my chart, I, doubtful, put about, and make the untried coast.

At such a moment one thinks wistfully of that fair, misty world which is all one's own, yet on the outside of which one stands so humbly and so gently. One thinks of the unseen faces, of the unknown friends who have read one's tales of other people's lives, and cared to read, and told one so, and made one believe in their kindness and affection and fidelity for thirty years. And the hesitating heart calls out to them : Will you let me be sorry? Thirty years! It is a good while that you and I have kept step together. Shall we miss it now? If you will care to hear such chapters as may select themselves from the story of the story-teller, you have the oldest right to choose, and I, the happy will to please you if I can.

The lives of the makers of books are very much like other people's in most respects, but especially in this : that they are either rebels to, or subjects of, their ancestry. The lives of some literary persons begin a good while after they are born. Others begin a good while before.

Of this latter kind is mine.

It has sometimes occurred to me to find myself the possessor of a sort of unholy envy of writers concerning whom our stout American phrase says that they have "made themselves." What delight to be aware that one has not only created one's work, but the worker! What elation in the remembrance of the battle against a commercial, or a scientific, or a worldly and superficial heredity; in the recollection of the tug with habit and education, and the overthrow of impulses setting in other directions than the chosen movement of one's own soul!

What pleasure in the proud knowledge that all one's success is one's own doing, and the sum of it cast up to one's credit upon the long ledger of life ! To this exhilarating self-content I can lay no claim. For whatever measure of what is called success has fallen to my lot, I can ask no credit. I find myself in the chastened position of one whose literary abilities all belong to one's ancestors.

It is humbling --- I do not deny that it may be morally invigorating---to feel that whatever is "worth mentioning" in my life is no affair of mine, but falls under the beautiful and terrible law by which the dead men and women whose blood bounds in our being control our destinies.

Yet (with the notable exception of my father) I have less than the usual store of personal acquaintance with the "people who most influenced me." Of my grandfather, Moses Stuart, I have but two recollections; and these, taken together, may not be quite devoid of interest, as showing how the law of selection works in the mind of an imaginative child.

I remember seeing the eminent Professor of Sacred Literature come into his dining-room one morning in his old house on Andover Hill which was built for him, and marked the creation of his department in the early days of the seminary history. He looked very tall and imposing. He had a mug in his hand, and his face smiled like the silver of which it was made.

The mug was full of milk, and he handed it ceremoniously to the year-old baby, his namesake and grandson, my first brother, whose high-chair stood at the table.

Then, I remember---it must have been a little more than a year after that --- seeing the professor in his coffin in the front hall; that he looked taller than he did before, but still imposing; that he had his best coat on --- the one, I think, in which he preached; and that he was the first dead person I had ever seen.

Whenever the gray-headed men who knew him used to sit about, relating anecdotes of him --- as, how many commentaries he published, or how he introduced the first German lexicon into this country (as if a girl in short dresses would be absorbingly interested in her grandfather's dictionaries!) ---I saw the silver mug and the coffin.

Gradually the German lexicon in a hazy condition got melted in between them. Sometimes the baby's mug sat upon the dictionary. Sometimes the dictionary lay upon the coffin. Sometimes the baby spilled the milk out of the mug upon the dictionary. But for my personal uses, the memoirs of the distinguished scholar began and ended with the mug and the coffin.

The other grandfather was not distinguished; he was but an orthodox minister of ability and originality, and with a vivacious personal history. Of him I knew something. From his own lips came thrilling stories of his connection with the underground railway of slavery days; how he sent the sharpest carving-knife in the house, concealed in a basket of food, to a hidden fugitive slave who had vowed never to be taken alive, and whose master had come North in search of him. It was a fine thing, that throbbing humanity, which could in those days burst the reformer out of the evangelical husk, and I learned my lesson from it. ("Where did she get it?" conservative friends used to wail, whenever I was seen to have tumbled into the last new and unfashionable reform.)

From his own lips, too, I heard the accounts of that extraordinary case of house-possession of which (like Wesley) this innocent and unimaginative country minister, who had no more faith in "spooks" than he had in Universalists, was made the astonished victim.

Night upon night I have crept gasping to bed, and shivered for hours with my head under the clothes, after an evening spent in listening to this authentic and fantastic family tale. How the candlesticks walked out into the air from the mantelpiece and back again; how the chairs of skeptical visitors collected from all parts of the country to study what one had hardly then begun to call the "phenomena" at the parsonage at Stratford, Connecticut, hopped after the guests when they crossed the room; how the dishes at the table leaped, and the silver forks were bent by unseen hands, and cold turnips dropped from the solid ceiling; and ghastly images were found, composed of underclothing proved to have been locked at the time in drawers of which the only key lay all the while in Dr. Phelps's pocket; and how the mysterious agencies, purporting by alphabetical raps upon bed-head or on table to be in torments of the nether world, being asked what their host could do to relieve them, demanded a piece of squash pie.

From the old man's own calm hands, within a year or two of his death, I received the legacy of the written journal of these phenomena, as recorded by the victim from day to day, during the seven months that this mysterious misfortune dwelt within his house.

It may be prudent to say, just here, that it will be quite useless to make any further inquiries of me upon the subject, or to ask of me a request which has been repeated till I am fain to put an end to it ---for either loan or copy of these records for the benefit of either personal or scientific curiosity. Both loaning and copying are now impossible, and have been made so by family wishes which will be sacredly respected. The phenomena themselves have long been too widely known to be ignored, and I have no hesitation in making reference to them.

Perhaps it is partly on account of the traditions respecting this bit of family history that I am so often asked if I am a spiritualist. I am sometimes tempted to reply in grammar comprehensible to the writers of certain letters which I receive upon the subject:---

"No; nor none of our folks!"

How the Connecticut parson on whom this mysterious infliction fell ever came out of it not a spiritualist, who can tell ? That the phenomena were facts, and facts explicable by no known natural law, he was forced, like others in similar positions, to believe and admit.

That he should study the subject of spiritualism carefully from then until the end of his life, was inevitable.

But, as nearly as I can make it out, on the whole, he liked his Bible better.

Things like these did not happen on Andover Hill; and my talks with this very interesting grandfather gave me my first vivid sensation of the possibilities of life.

With what thrills of hope and fear I listened for thumps on the head of my bed, or watched anxiously to see my candlestick walk out into the air!

But not a thump! Not a rap! Never a snap of the weakest proportions (not explicable hy natural laws) has, from that day to this, visited my personal career. Not a candlestick ever walked an inch for me. I have never been able to induce a chair to hop after me. No turnip has consented to drop from the ceiling for me. Planchette, in her day, wrote hundreds of lines for me, but never one that was of the slightest possible significance to me or to the universe at large. Never did a medium tell me anything that ever came to pass; though one of them once made a whole winter miserable by prophesying a death which did not occur.

Being destitute of objections to belief in the usefulness of spiritualistic mystery, ---in fact, by temperament, perhaps inclining to hope that such phenomena may be tamed and yoked, and made to work for human happiness, --- yet there seems to be something about me which these agencies do not find congenial. Though I have gone longing for a sign, no sign has been given me. Though I have been always ready to believe all other people's mysteries, no inexplicable facts have honored my experience.

The only personal prophecy ever strictly fulfilled in my life was --- I am not certain whether I ought to feel embarrassed in alluding to it ---made by a gypsy fortune-teller. She was young and pretty, the seventh child of a seventh child, and she lived in a Massachusetts shoe-town by the name of Lynn. And what was it? Oh, but you must excuse me.

The grandfather to whom these marvels happened was not, as I say, a literary man; yet even he did write a little book --- a religious tale, or tract, after the manner of his day and profession ; and it took to itself a circulation of two hundred thousand copies. I remember how Mr. James T. Fields laughed when he heard of it ---that merry laugh peculiar to himself.

"You can't help it," the publisher said; "you come of a family of large circulations."

One day I was at school with my brother, ---a little, private school, down by what were called the English dormitories in Andover.

I was eight years old. Some one came in and whispered to the teacher. Her face turned very grave, and she came up to us quietly, and called us out into the entry, and gently put on our things.

"You are to go home," she said; "your mother is dead." I took my little brother's hand without a word, and we trudged off. I do not think we spoke --- I am sure we did not cry --- on the way home. I remember perfectly that we were very gayly dressed. Our mother liked bright, almost barbaric colors on children.

The little boy's coat was of red broadcloth, and my cape of a canary yellow, dyed at home in white-oak dye. The two colors flared before my eyes as we shuffled along and crushed the crisp, dead leaves that were tossing in the autumn wind all over Andover Hill.

When we got home they told us it was a mistake; she was not dead; and we were sent back to school. But, in a few weeks after that, one day we were told we need not go to school at all; the red and yellow coats came off, and little black ones took their places. The new baby, in his haggard father's arms, was baptized at his mother's funeral; and we looked on, and wondered what it all meant, and what became of children whose mother was obliged to go to heaven when she seemed so necessary in Andover.

At eight years of age a child cannot be expected to know her mother intimately, and it is hard for me always to distinguish between the effect produced upon me by her literary success as I have since understood it, and that left by her own truly extraordinary personality upon the annals of the nursery.

My mother, whose name I am proud to wear, was the eldest daughter of Professor Stuart, and inherited his intellectuality. At the time of her death she was at the first blossom of her very positive and widely-promising success as a writer of the simple home stories which took such a hold upon the popular heart. Her "Sunnyside" had already reached a circulation of one hundred thousand copies, and she was following it fast---too fast---by other books for which the critics and the publishers clamored. Her last book and her last baby came together, and killed her. She lived one of those rich and piteous lives such as only gifted women know; torn by the civil war of the dual nature which can be given to women only. It was as natural for her daughter to write as to breathe but it was impossible for her daughter to forget that a woman of intellectual power could be the must successful of mothers.

"Everybody's mother is a remarkable woman," my father used to say when he read overdrawn memoirs indited by devout children; and yet I have sometimes felt as if even the generation that knows her not would feel a certain degree of interest in the tact and power by which this unusual woman achieved the difficult reconciliation between genius and domestic life.

In our times and to our women such a problem is practical, indeed. One need not posses genius to understand it now. A career is enough.

The author of Sunnyside," "The Angel on the Right Shoulder," and "Peep at Number Five," lived before women had careers and public sympathy in them. Her nature was drawn against the grain of her times and of her circumstances and where our feet find easy walking, hers were hedged. A child's memories go for something by way of tribute to the achievement of one of those rare women of the elder time whose gifts forced her out, but whose heart held her in.

I can remember no time when I did not understand that my mother must write books because people would have and read them; but I cannot remember one hour in which her children needed her and did not find her.

My first distinct vision of this kind of a mother gives her by the nursery lamp, reading to us her own stories, written for ourselves, never meant to go beyond that little public of two, and illustrated in colored crayons by her own pencil. For her gift in this direction was of an original quality, and had she not been a writer she must have achieved something as an artist.

Perhaps it was to keep the standards up, and a little girl's filial adoration down, that these readings ended with some classic --- Wordsworth, I remember most often --- " We are Seven," or "Lucy Gray."

It is certain that I very early had the conviction that a mother was a being of power and importance to the world; but that the world had no business with her when we wanted her. In a word, she was a strong and lovely symmetry --- a woman whose heart had not enfeebled her head, but whose head could never freeze her heart.

I hardly know which of those charming ways in which I learned to spell the word motherhood impressed me most. All seemed to go on together side by side and step by step. Now she sits correcting proof-sheets, and now she is painting apostles for the baby's first Bible lesson. Now she is writing her new book, and now she is dyeing things canary-yellow in the white-oak dye-for the professor's salary is small, and a crushing economy was in those days one of the conditions of faculty life on Andover Hill. Now---for her practical ingenuity was unlimited ---she is whittling little wooden feet to stretch the children's stockings on, to save them from shrinking; and now she is reading to us from the old, red copy of Hazlitt's "British Poets," by the register, upon a winter night. Now she is a popular writer, incredulous of her first success, with her future flashing before her; and now she is a tired, tender mother, crooning to a sick child, while the MS. lies unprinted on the table, and the publishers are wishing their professor's wife were a free woman, childless and solitary, able to send copy as fast as it is wanted. The struggle killed her, but she fought till she fell.

In these different days, when,

"Pealing, the clock of time
Has struck the Woman's Hour,"

I have sometimes been glad, as my time came to face the long question which life puts to-day to all women who think and feel, and who care for other women and are loyal to them, that I had those early visions of my own to look upon.

When I was learning why the sun rose and the moon set, how the flowers grew and the rain fell, that God and heaven and art and letters existed, that it was intelligent to say one's prayers, and that well-bred children never told a lie, I learned that a mother can be strong and still be sweet, and sweet although she is strong; and that she whom the world and her children both have need of, is of more value to each, for this very reason.

I said it was impossible to be her daughter and not to write. Rather, I should say, impossible to be their daughter and not to have something to say, and a pen to say it.

The comparatively recent close of my father's life has not left him yet forgotten, and it can hardly be necessary for me to do more than to refer to the name of Austin Phelps to recall to that part of our public which knew and loved him the quality of his work.

"The Still Hour" is yet read, and there are enough who remember how widely this book has been known and loved on both sides of the ocean, and how rich was the professor's literary gift. His Andover lectures, which in their published form have become classics, stand without peers to-day, and are the accepted textbooks of his department.

It has fallen to me otherwise to say so much of my peculiar indebtedness to my father, that I shall forbid myself, and spare my reader, too much repetition of a loving credit which it would not be possible altogether to omit from this chapter.

He who becomes father and mother in one to motherless children, bears a burden which men shirk or stagger under; and there was not a shirking cell in his brain or heart.

As I have elsewhere said: "There was hardly a chapter in my life of which he was not in some sense, whether revealed or concealed, the hero."

"If I am asked to sum in a few words the vivid points of his influence, I find it as hard to give definite form to my indebtedness to the Christian scholar whose daughter it is my honor to be, as to specify the particulars in which one responds to sunshine or oxygen. He was my climate. As soon as I began to think, I began to reverence thought and study and the hard work of a man devoted to the high ends of a scholar's life. His department was that of rhetoric, and his appreciation of the uses and graces of language very early descended like a mantle upon me. I learned to read and to love reading, not because I was made to, but because I could not help it. It was the atmosphere I breathed."

"Day after day the watchful girl observed the life of a student---its scholarly tastes, its high ideals, its scorn of worldliness and paltry aims or petty indulgences, and forever its magnificent habits of work."

"At sixteen, I remember, there came to me a distinct arousing or awakening to the intellectual life. As I look back, I see it in a flashlight. Most of the important phases or crises of our lives can be traced to some one influence or event, and this one I connect directly with the reading to me by my father of the writings of De Quincey and the poems of Wordsworth. Every one who has ever heard him preach or lecture remembers the rare quality of Professor Phelps's voice. As a pulpit orator he was one of the few, and to hear him read in his own study was an absorbing experience. To this day I cannot put myself outside of certain pages of the laureate or the essayist. I do not read; I listen. The great lines beginning---

"'Thanks to the human heart by which we live,
   Thanks to its tenderness, its joys and fears;'

the great passage which opens : 'Then like a chorus the passion deepened,' and which rises to the aching cry 'Everlasting farewells! . . . Everlasting farewells!' ring in my ears as they left his lips."

For my first effort to sail the sea of letters, it occurs to me that I ought to say that my father's literary reputation cannot be held responsible.

I had reached (to take a step backwards in the story) the mature age of thirteen. I was a little girl in low-necked gingham dresses, I know, because I remember I had on one (of a purple shade, and incredibly unbecoming to a half-grown, brunette girl) one evening when my first gentleman caller came to see me.

I felt that the fact that he was my Sundayschool teacher detracted from the importance of the occasion, but did not extinguish it.

It was perhaps half-past eight, and, obediently to law and gospel, I had gone upstairs.

The actual troubles of life have never dulled my sense of mortification at overhearing from my little room t the head of the stairs, where I was struggling to get into that gingham gown and present a tardy appearance, a voice distinctly excusing me on the ground that it was past her usual bedtime, and she had gone to bed.

Whether the anguish of that occasion so far aged me that it had anything to do with my first literary undertaking, I cannot say; but I am sure that it was during this particular year that I determined to become an individual and contribute to the "Youth's Companion."

I did so. My contribution was accepted and paid for by the appearance in my father's postoffice box of the paper for a year; and my impression is that I wore high-necked dresses pretty soon thereafter, and was allowed to sit up till nine o'clock. At any rate, these memorable events are distinctly intertwined in my mind.

This was in the days when even the "Companion," that oldest and most delightful of children's journals, printed things like these:---

"Julia B. loved the country because whenever she walked out she could see God in the face of Nature."

I really think that the semi-column which I sent to that distinguished paper was a tone or two above this. But I can remember nothing about it, except that there was a sister who neglected her little brothers, and hence defeated the first object of existence in a woman-child. It was very proper, and very pious, and very much like what well-brought-up little girls were taught to do, to be, to suffer, or to write in those days. I have often intended to ask Mr. Ford if the staff discovered any signs of literary promise in that funny little performance.

At all events, my literary ambitions, with this solitary exercise, came to a sudden suspension. I have no recollection of having written or of having wanted to write anything more for a long time.

I was not in the least a precocious young person, and very much of a tomboy into the bargain. I think I was far more likely to have been found on the top of an apple-tree or walking the length of the seminary fence than writing rhymes or reading "solid reading." I know that I was once told by a queer old man in the street that little girls should not walk fences, and that I stood still and looked at him, transfixed with contempt. I do not think I vouchsafed him any answer at all. But this must have been while I was still in the little gingham gowns.

Perhaps this is the place, if anywhere, to mention the next experiment at helping along the literature of my native land of which I have any recollection. There was another little contribution --- a pious little contribution, like the first. When it was written, or what it was about, or where it was printed, it is impossible to remember; but I know that it appeared in some extremely orthodox young people's periodical --- I think, one with a missionary predilection. The point of interest I find to have been that I was paid for it.

With the exception of some private capital amassed by abstaining from butter (a method of creating a fortune of whose wisdom, I must say, I had the same doubts then that I have now), this was the first money I had ever earned. The sum was two dollars and a half. It became my immediate purpose not to squander this wealth. I had no spending money in particular that I recall. Three cents a week was, I believe, for years the limit of my personal income, and I am compelled to own that this sum was not expended at book-stalls, or for the benefit of the heathen who appealed to the generosity of professors' daughters through the treasurer of the chapel Sunday-school; but went solidly for cream cakes and apple turnovers alternately, one each week.

Two dollars and a half represented to me a standard of munificent possession which it would be difficult to make most girls in their first teens, and socially situated to-day as I was then, understand. To waste this fortune in riotous living was impossible. From the hour that I received that check for "two-fifty," cream cakes began to wear a juvenile air, and turnovers seemed unworthy of my position in life. I remember begging to be allowed to invest the sum "in pictures," and that my father, gently diverting my selection from a frowsy and popular "Hope" at whose memory I shudder even yet, induced me to find that I preferred some excellent photographs of Thorwaldsen's "Night" and "Morning," which he framed for me, and which hang in our rooms to-day.

It is impossible to forget the sense of dignity which marks the hour when one becomes a wage-earner. The humorous side of it is the least of it ---or was in my case. I felt that I had suddenly acquired value ---to myself, to my family, and to the world.

Probably all people who write "for a living" would agree with me in recalling the first check as the largest and most luxurious of life.

ANDOVER IS --- or Andover was --- like the lady to whom Steele gave immortality in the finest and most famous epigram ever offered to woman.

To have loved Andover; to have been born in Andover ---I am brought up short, in these notes, by the sudden recollection that I was not born in Andover. It has always been so difficult to believe it, that I am liable any day to forget it; but the facts compel me to infer that I was born within a mile of the State House. I must have become a citizen of Andover at the age of three, when my father resigned his Boston pulpit for the professorship of Rhetoric and Homiletics in Andover Seminary. I remember distinctly our arrival at the white mansion with the large, handsome grounds, the distant and mysterious grove, the rotund horse-chestnut trees, venerable and solemn, nearly a century old --- to this day a horse-chestnut always seems to me like a theological trustee --- and the sweep of playground so vast, so soft, so green, so fragrant, so clean, that the baby cockney ran imperiously to her father and demanded that he go build her a brick sidewalk to play upon.

What, I wonder, may be the earliest act of memory on record? Mine is not at all unusual -dating only to two and a half years; at which time I clearly remember being knocked down by my dog, in my father's area in Boston, and being crowed over by a rooster of abnormal proportions who towered between me and the sky, a dragon in size and capabilities.

My father always maintained that he distinctly remembered hearing the death of Napoleon announced in his presence when he was one year and a half old.

Is the humiliating difference between the instinctive selection of Napoleon and that of the rooster one of temperament or sex? In either case, it is significant enough to lead one to drop the subject.

Next to having been born in a university town, comes the advantage---if it be an advantage ---of having spent one's youth there. Mr. Howells says that he must be a dull fellow who does not, at some time or other, hate his native village; and I must confess that I have not, at all stages of my life, held my present opinion of Andover. There have been times when her gentle indifference to the preoccupations of the world has stung me, as all serenity stings restlessness. There have been times when the inevitable limitations of her horizon have seemed as familiar as the coffin-lid to the dead.

There was an epoch when her theology--- But, nevertheless, I certainly look back upon Andover Hill with a very real pleasure and heartfelt sense of debt.

It has been particularly asked of me to give some form to my recollections of a phase of local life which is now so obviously passing away that it has a certain historical interest.

That Andover remains upon the map of Massachusetts yet, one does not dispute; but the Andover of New England theology---the Andover of a peculiar people, the Andover that held herself apart from the world and all that was therein---will soon become an interesting wraith.

The life of a professor's daughter in a university town is always a little different from the lives of other girls; but the difference seems to me---unless she be by nature entirely alien to it --- in favor of the girl. Were I to sum in one word my impressions of the influences of Andover life upon a robust young mind and heart, I should call them gentle.

As soon as we began to think, we saw a community engaged in studying thought. As soon as we began to feel, we were aware of a neighborhood that did not feel superficially; at least, in certain higher directions. When we began to ask the "questions of life," which all intelligent young people ask sooner or later, we found ourselves in a village of three institutions and their dependencies committed to the pursuit of an ideal of education for which no amount of later, or what we call broader, training ever gives us any better word than Christian.

Such things tell. Andover girls did not waltz, or suffer summer engagements at Bar Harbor, a new one every year; neither did they read Ibsen or yellow novels; nor did they handle the French stories that are hidden from parents, though they were excellent French scholars in their day.

I do not even know that one can call them more "serious " than their city sisters; for we were a merry lot, at least, my lot were. But they were, I believe, especially open-hearted, gentle-minded girls.

If they were "out of the world" to a certain extent, they were, to another, out of the evil of it. As I look back upon the little drama between twelve and twenty, --- I might rather say, between two and twenty, Andover young people seem to me to have been as truly and naturally innocent as one may meet anywhere in the world. Some of these private records of girl-history were so white, so clear, so sweet, that to read them would be like watching a morning-glory open. The world is full, thank Heaven, of lovely girls; but though other forms or phases of gentle society claim their full quota, I never saw a lovelier than those I knew on Andover Hill.

One terrible tragedy, indeed, befell our little "set;" for we had our sets in Andover as well as they of Newport or New York.

A high-bred girl of exceptional beauty was furtively kissed one evening by a daring boy (not a native of Andover, I hasten to explain), and the furore which followed this unprecedented enormity it would be impossible to describe to a member of more complicated circles of society. Fancy the reception given such a commonplace at any of our fashionable summer resorts to-day!

On Andover Hill the event was a moral cataclysm. Andover girls were country girls, but not of rustic (any more than of metropolitan) social training. Which of them would have suffered an Academy boy, walking home with her from a lecture or a prayer-meeting, any little privilege which he might not have taken in her father's house and with her mother's knowledge? I never knew one. The case of which I speak was historic, and as far as I ever knew, unique, and was that of a victim, not an offender.

The little beauty to whom this atrocity happened cried all night and all the next day; she was reported not to have stopped crying for twenty-six hours. Her pretty face grew wan and haggard. She was too ill to go to her lessons.

The teachers---to whom she had promptly related the circumstance --- condoled with her; the entire school vowed to avenge her; we were a score of as disturbed and indignant girls as ever wept over woman's wrongs or scorned a man's depravity.

Yet, for aught I know to the contrary, this abandoned young man may have grown up to become a virtuous member of society, possibly even an exemplary husband and father. I have never been able to trace his history ; probably the moral repulsion was too great.

Yet they were no prigs, for their innocence! Andover girls, in the best and brightest sense of the word, led a gay life.

The preponderance of young men on the Hill gave more than ample opportunity for well-mannered good times; and we made the most of them.

Legends of the feminine triumphs of past generations were handed breathlessly down to us, and cherished with awe. A lady of the village, said to have been once very handsome, was credibly reported to have refused nineteen offers of marriage. Another, still plainly beautiful, was known to have received and declined the suits of nine theologues in one winter. Neither of these ladies married. We watched their whitening hairs and serene faces with a certain pride of sex, not easily to be understood by a man. When we began to think how many times they might have married, the subject assumed sensational proportions. In fact, the maiden ladies of Andover always, I fancied, regarded each other with a peculiar sense of peace. Each knew---and knew that the rest knew --- that it was (to use the Andover phraseology) not of predestination or foreordination, but of free will absolute, that an Andover girl passed through life alone. This little social fact, which is undoubtedly true of most, if not all, university towns, had mingled effects upon impressionable girls; for the proportion of masculine society was almost Western in its munificence.

Perhaps it is my duty to say just here that, if honestly put to the question, I should admit that this proportion was almost too munificent for the methods of education then---and still to an extent now --- in vogue.

A large Academy for boys, and a flourishing Seminary for young men, set across the village streets from two lively girls' schools, gave to one observer of this little scholastic world her first argument for co-education.

I am confident that if the boys who serenaded (right manfully) under the windows of Abbot Academy or of "The Nunnery," or who found their lady's colors on the bouquets that were tossed from balconies of professors' houses, had been put, class to class, in competition with us, they would have wasted less time upon us; and I could not deny that if the girls who cut little holes in their fans through which one could look, undetected and unreproved, at one's favorite Academy boy, on some public occasion, had been preparing to meet or pass that boy at Euclid or Xenophon recitation next morning, he would have occupied less of their fancy. Intellectual competition is simpler, severer, and more wholesome than the unmitigated social plane; and a mingling of the two may be found calculated to produce the happiest results.

"Poor souls!" said a Boston lady once to me, upon my alluding to a certain literary club which was at that time occupying the enthusiasm of the Hill. "Poor souls! I suppose they are so starved for society!" We can fancy the amusement with which this comment would have been received if it had been repeated ---but it never was repeated till this moment --- in Andover.

For Andover had her social life, and knew no better, for the most part, than to enjoy it. It is true that many of her diversions took on that religious or academic character natural to the place. Of village parish life we knew nothing, for our chapel was, like others of its kind, rather an exclusive little place of worship. We were ignorant of pastoral visits, deacons, parochial gossip, church fairs, and what Professor Park used to call "the doughnut business;" and, though we cultivated a weekly prayermeeting in the lecture-room, I think its chief usefulness was as a training-school for theological students whose early efforts at public exhortation (poor fellows!) quaveringly besought their professors to grow in grace, and admonished the families of the Faculty circle to repent.

But we had our lectures and our concerts ---quite distinct, as orthodox circles will understand, from those missionary festivals which went, I never discovered why, by the name of Monthly Concerts --- and our Porter Rhets. I believe this cipher stood for Porter Rhetorical; and research, if pushed far enough, would develop the fact that Porter indicated a dead professor who once founded a chair and a debating society for young men. Then we had our anniversaries and our exhibitions, when we got ourselves into our organdie muslins or best coats, and listened to the boys spouting Greek and Latin orations in the old, red brick Academy, and heard the theological students ---but here this reporter is forced to pause. I suppose I ought to be ashamed of it, but the fact is, that I never attended an anniversary exercise of the Seminary in my life. It would be difficult to say why. I think my reluctance consisted in an abnormal objection to Trustees. So far as I know, they were an innocent set of men, of good reputations and quite harmless. But I certainly acquired, at a very early age, an antipathy to this class of Americans, from which I have never recovered.

Our anniversaries occurred, according to the barbaric custom of the times, in the hottest heat of August ; and if there be a hotter place in Massachusetts than Andover was, I have yet to simmer in it. Our houses were, of course, thrown open, and crowded to the shingles.

I remember once sharing my tiny room with a little guest who would not have the window open, though the thermometer had stood above ninety day and night for a week; and because she was a trustee's daughter, I must not complain. Perhaps this experience emphasized a natural lack of sympathy with her father.

At all events, I cherished a hidden antagonism to these excellent and useful men, of which I make this late and public confession. It seemed to me that everybody in Andover was afraid of them. I "took it out" in the cordial defiance of a born rebel.

Then we had our tea-parties ---theological, of course,---when the students came to tea in alphabetical order; and the professor told his best stories; and the ladies of the family were expected to keep more or less quiet while the gentlemen talked. But this, I should say, was of the earlier time.

And, of course, we had the occasional supply; and as for the clerical guest, in some shape he was always with us.

I remember the shocked expression on the face of a not very eminent minister, because I joined in the conversation when, in the absence of my father's wife, the new mother, it fell to me to take the head of the table. It was truly a stimulating conversation, intellectual, and, like all clerical conversation, vivaciously amusing and it swept me in, unconsciously. I think this occurred after I had written "The Gates Ajar."

This good man has since become an earnest anti-suffragist and opposer of the movement for the higher education of women. I can only hope he does not owe his dismal convictions to the moral jar received on that occasion; and I regret to learn that his daughter has been forbidden to go to college. I ought in justice to add that I find I do not think of this guest as a representative of his class.

We had, too, our levees --- that was the word; by it one meant what is now called a reception. I have been told that my mother, who was a woman of marked social tastes and gifts, oppressed by the lack of variety in Andover life, originated this innocent form of dissipation.

These festivities, like others in academic towns, were democratic to a degree amusing or inspiring, according to the temperament of the spectator.

The professors' brilliantly-lighted drawingrooms were thrown open to the students and families of the Hill. Distinguished men jostled the Academy boy who built the furnace fire to pay for his education, and who might be found on the faculty some day, in his turn, or might himself acquire an enviable and well-earned celebrity.

Eminent guests from out of town stood elbow to elbow with poor theologues destined to the missionary field, and pathetically observing the Andover levee as one of the last occasions of civilized gayety in which it might be theirs to share. Ladies from Beacon Street or from New York might be seen chatting with some gentle figure in black, one of those widowed and brave women whose struggles to sustain life and educate their children by boarding students form so large a part of the pathos of academic towns.

One such I knew who met on one of these occasions a member of the club for which she provided. The lady was charming, well-dressed, well-mannered.

The young man, innocent of linen, had appeared at the levee in a gray flannel shirt. Introductions passed. The lady bowed.

"I am happy," stammered the poor fellow, "I am happy to meet the woman who cooks our victuals."

If it be asked, Why educate a man like that for the Christian ministry? ---but it was not asked. Like all monstrosities, he grew without permission.

Let us hasten to call him the exception that he was to what, on the whole, was (in those days) a fair, wholesome rule of theological selection. The professor's eyes flashed when he heard the story.

"I have never approved," I think he said, "of the Special Course."

For the professor believed in no short-cut to the pulpit; but pleaded for all the education, all the opportunity, all the culture, all the gifts, all the graces possible to a man's privilege or energy, whereby to fit him to preach the Christian religion. But, like other professors, he could not always have his way.

It ought to be said, perhaps, that, beside the self-made or self-making man, there always sat upon the old benches in the lecture-room a certain proportion of gentlemen born and bred to ease and affluence, who had chosen their life's work from motives which were, at least, as much to be respected as the struggles of the converted newsboy or the penitent expressman.

Take her at her dullest, I think we were very fond of Andover; and though we dutifully improved our opportunities to present ourselves in other circles of society, yet, like fisher-folk or mountain-folk, we were always uneasy away from home. I remember on my first visit to New York or Boston ---and this although my father was with me---quietly crying my eyes out behind the tall, embroidered screen which the hostess moved before the grate, because the fire-light made me so homesick. Who forgets his first attack of nostalgia? Alas! so far as this recorder is concerned, the first was too far from the last. For I am cursed (or blessed) with a love of home so inevitable and so passionate as to be nothing less than ridiculous to my day and generation --- a day of rovers, a generation of shawl-straps and valises.

"Do you never want to stay?" I once asked a distinguished author whose domestic uprootings were so frequent as to cause remark even in America.

"I am the most homesick man who ever lived," he responded sadly. "If I only pass a night in a sleeping-car, I hate to leave my berth."

"You must have cultivated society in Andover," an eminent Cambridge writer once said to me, with more sincerity of tone than was to be expected of the Cambridge accent as addressed to the Andover fact. I was young then, and I remember to have answered, honestly enough, but with what must have struck this superior man as unpardonable flippancy ---

"Oh, but one gets tired of seeing only cultivated people!"

I have thought of it sometimes since, when, in other surroundings, the memory of that peaceful, scholarly life has returned poignantly to me.

When one can "run in" any day to homes like those on that quiet and conscientious Hill, one may not do it; but when one cannot, one appreciates their high and gentle influence.

One of the historic figures of my day in Andover was Professor Park. Equally eminent both as a preacher and as a theologian, his fame was great in Zion; and "the world" itself had knowledge of him, and did him honor.

He was a striking figure in the days which were the best of Andover. He was unquestionably a genius; the fact that it was a kind of genius for which the temper of our times is soon likely to find declining uses gives some especial interest to his name.

The appearances are that he will be the last of his type, once so powerful and still so venerable in New England history. He wears (for he is yet living) the dignity of a closing cycle; there is something sad and grand about his individualism, as there is about the last great chief of a tribe or the last king of a dynasty.

In his youth he was the progressive of evangelical theology. In his age he stands the proud and reticent conservative, the now silent representative of a departed glory, a departed severity ---and, we must admit, of a departed strength --- from which the theology of our times has melted away. Like other men in such positions, he has had battles to fight, and he has fought them; enemies to make, and he has made them. How can he keep them? He is growing old so gently and so kindly! Ardent friends and worshiping admirers he has always had, and kept, and deserved.

A lady well known among the writers of our day, herself a professor's daughter from a New England college town, happened once to be talking with me in a lonely hour and in a mood of confidence.

"Oh," she cried, "it seems some of these desolate nights as if I must go home and sit watching for my father to come back from faculty meeting!"

But the tears smote her face, and she turned away. I knew that she had been her dead father's idol, and he hers.

To her listener what a panorama in those two words: "Faculty meeting!"

Every professor's daughter, every woman from a university family, can see it all. The whole scholastic and domestic, studious and tender life comes back. Faculty meeting! We wait for the tired professor who had the latest difference to settle with his colleagues, or the newest breach to soothe, or the favorite move to push; how late he is! He comes in softly, haggard and spent, closing the door quietly so that no one shall be wakened by this midnight dissipation. The woman who loves him most anxiously --- be it wife or be it daughter --- is waiting for him. Perhaps there is a little whispered sympathy for the trouble in the faculty which he does not tell. Perhaps there is a little expedition to the pantry for a midnight lunch.

My first recollections of Professor Park give me his tall, gaunt, but well-proportioned figure striding up and down the gravel walks in front of the house, two hours before time for faculty meeting, in solemn conclave with my father. The two were friends --- barring those interludes common to all faculties, when professional differences are in the foreground---and the pacing of their united feet might have worn Andover Hill through to the central fires. For years I cultivated an objection to Professor Park as being the chief visible reason why we had to wait for supper.

I remember his celebrated sermons quite well. The chapel was always thronged, and---as there were no particular fire-laws in those days on Andover Hill---the aisles brimmed over when it was known that Professor Park or Professor Phelps was to preach. I think I usually began with a little jealous counting of the audience, lest it should prove bigger than my father's; but even a child could not long listen to Professor Park and not forget her small affairs, and all affairs except the eloquence of the man.

Great, I believe it was. Certain distinguished sermons had their popular names, as "The Judas Sermon," or "The Peter Sermon," and drew their admirers accordingly. He was a man of marked emotional nature, which he often found it hard to control. A skeptical critic might have wondered whether the tears welled, or the face broke, or the voice trembled, always just at the right moment, from pure spontaneity. But those who knew the preacher personally never doubted the genuineness of the feeling that swept and carried orator and hearers down. We do not hear such sermons now.

Professor Park has always been a man of social ease and wit. The last time I saw him, at the age of eighty-five, in his house in Andover, I thought, one need not say, "has been;" and to recall his brilliant talk that day gives me hesitation over the past tense of this reminiscence. On the whole, with the exception of Doctor Holmes, I think I should call Professor Park the best converser, --- at least among eminent men ---whom I have ever met.

He has always been a man very sensitive to the intellectual values of life, and fully inclined perhaps to approach the spiritual through those. It is easy to misunderstand a religious teacher of this temperament, and his admiring students may have sometimes done so.

One in particular I remember to have heard of who neglected the lecture-room to cultivate upon his own responsibility the mission work of what was known as Abbott Village. To the Christian socialism of our day, the misery of factory life might seem as important for the future clergyman as the system of theology regnant in his particular seminary---but that was not the fashion of the time; at all events, the man was a student under the professor's orders, and the orders were, Keep to the curriculum; and I can but think that the professor was right when he caustically said : ---

Sometimes, too, the students used to beg off to go on book-agencies, or to prosecute other forms of money-making; and of one such Professor Park was heard to say that he "sacrificed his education to get the means of paying for it."

I am indebted to Professor Park for this: "Professor Stuart and myself were reluctant to release them from their studies. Professor Stuart remarked of one student that he got excused every Saturday for the purpose of going home for a week, and always stayed a fortnight."

The last time that I saw Professor Park he told me a good story. It concerned the days of his prime, when he had been preaching somewhere --- in Boston or New York, I think---and after the audience was dismissed a man lingered and approached him.

"Sir," said the stranger, "I am under great obligations to you. Your discourse has moved me greatly. I can truly say that I believe I shall owe the salvation of my soul to you. I wish to offer, sir, to the seminary with which you are connected, a slight tribute of my admiration for and indebtedness to you." The gentleman drew out his purse.

"I waited, breathless," said Professor Park, with his own tremendous solemnity of manner; "I awaited the tribute of that grateful man. At what price did he value his soul? I anticipated a contribution for the seminary which it would be a privilege to offer. At what rate did my converted hearer price his soul ?Hundreds ? Thousands? Tens of thousands? With indescribable dignity the man handed to me--- a five-dollar bill! "

PERHAPS no one has ever denied, or, more definitely, has ever wished to deny, that Andover society consisted largely of people with obvious religious convictions; and that her visitors were chiefly of an orthodox congregational turn of mind. I do not remember that we ever saw any reason for regret in this "feature" of the Hill. It is true, however, that a dash of the world's people made their way among us.

I remember certain appearances of Ralph Waldo Emerson. If I am correct about it, he had been persuaded by some emancipated and daring mind to give us several lectures.

He was my father's guest on one of these occasions, and I met him for the first time then. Emerson seemed to me---not to speak disrespectfully---in a much muddled state of his distinguished mind, on Andover Hill. His blazing seer's gaze took us all in, politely; it burned straight on, with its own philosophic fire; but it wore, at moments, a puzzled softness.

His clear-cut, sarcastic lips sought to assume the well-bred curves of conformity to the environment of entertainers who valued him so far as to demand a series of his own lectures; but the cynic of his temperamental revolt from us, or, to be exact, from the thing which he supposed us to be, lurked in every line of his memorable face.

By the way, what a look of the eagle it had!

The poet ---I was about to say the pagan poet---quickly recognized, to a degree, that he was not among a group of barbarians; and I remember the marked respect with which he observed my father's noble head and countenance, and the attention with which he listened to the low, perfectly modulated voice of his host. But Mr. Emerson was accustomed to do the talking himself; this occasion proved no exception. Quite promptly, I remember, he set adrift upon the sea of Alcott.

Now, we had heard of Mr. Alcott in Andover, it is true, but we did not look upon him exactly through Mr. Emerson's marine-glass; and, though the professor did his hospitable best to sustain his end of the conversation, it swayed off gracefully into monologue. We listened deferentially while the philosopher pronounced Bronson Alcott the greatest mind of our day --- I think he said the greatest since Plato. He was capable of it, in moments of his own exaltation. I thought I detected a twinkle in my father's blue eye; but the fine curve of his lips remained politely closed; and our distinguished guest spoke on.

There was something noble about this ardent way of appreciating his friends, and Emerson was distinguished for it, among those who knew him well.

Publishers understood that his literary judgment was touchingly warped by his personal admirations. He would offer some impossible manuscript as the work of dawning genius; it would be politely received, and filed in the rejected pigeon-holes. Who knows what the great man thought when his friend's poem failed to see the light of the market?

On this particular occasion the conversation changed to Browning. Now, the professor was not a member of a Browning class; and here, again, his attitude towards the subject was one of well-mannered respect rather than of abandoned enthusiasm. (Had it only been Wordsworth!) A lady was present, young, and of the Browningesque temperament. Mr. Emerson expressed himself finely to the effect that there was something outside of ourselves about Browning---that we might not always grasp him---that he seemed, at times, to require an extra sense.

"Is it not because he touches our extra moods?" asked the lady. The poet's face turned towards her quickly; he had not noticed her before; a subtle change touched his expression, as if he would have liked to say: For the first time since this subject was introduced in this Calvinistic drawing-room, I find myself understood.

It chanced that we had a Chaucer Club in Andover at that time; a small company, severely selected, not to flirt or to chat, but to work. We had studied hard for a year, and most of us had gone Chaucer mad. This present writer was the unfortunate exception to that idolatrous enthusiasm, and---meeting Mr. Emerson at another time---took modest occasion in answer to a remark of his to say something of the sort.

"Chaucer interests me, certainly, but I cannot make myself feel as the others do. He does not take hold of my nature. He is too far back. I am afraid I am too much of a modern. It is a pity, I know."

"It is a pity," observed Mr. Emerson.

"What would you read? The 'Morning Advertiser'?" The Chaucer Club glared at me in what, I must say, I felt to be unholy triumph.

Not a glance of sympathy reached me, where I sat, demolished before the rebuke of the great man. I distinctly heard a chuckle from a feminine member. Yet, what had the dissenter done, or tried to do? Only to proffer common honesty in a little matter where affectation would have been the flowery way; and I must say that I have never loved the Father of English Poetry any better for this episode.

The point, however, at which I am coming is the effect wrought upon Mr. Emerson's mind by the history of that club. It seemed to us disproportionate to the occasion that he should feel and manifest so much surprise at our existence. This he did, more than once, and with a genuineness not to be mistaken.

That an organization for the study of Chaucer could subsist on Andover Hill, he could not understand. What he thought us, or thought about us, who can say? He seemed as much taken aback as if he had found a tribe of Cherokees studying onomatopoeia in English verse.

"A Chaucer club! In Andover?" he repeated. The seer was perplexed.

So far had I written, out of that inner consciousness, which may be right or may be wrong, when it occurred to me to test my little profile sketch of this great man by the exact method; and I went for the first and only time in my life to Concord.

On a grim February day I drove through the icy and sloppy streets of a village on the northern railroad where winter holds on so much harder than it does in our Garden City of the southern side, and was graciously admitted to the philosopher's study. I feel compelled to say that the simplicity and serenity of that silent room touched and instructed me. The absence of luxuries, the severity of comforts, the plain, scholarly atmosphere of the spot in which this great man asked for so little and achieved so much, impressed me strongly. Our Andover life seemed complex beside that Concord study. I reread my interpretation of Mr. Emerson with a definite doubt whether I ought not to rewrite it; ---it seemed to me so sure that he who lived and wrought in that northeast front room in that white house among the Concord pines must have been the simplest and gentlest of men, and might have given to Andover Hill something besides that kind of attention which, it seemed to me, was concentrated like a burning-glass upon us.

Of course, whenever we found ourselves in forms of society not in harmony with our religious views, we were accustomed, in various ways, to meet with a predisposition similar to that which I thought I detected in Mr. Emerson. As a psychological study this has always interested me, just as one is interested in the attitude of mind exhibited by the Old School physician towards the Homeopathist with whom he graduated at the Harvard Medical School. Possibly that graduate may have distinguished himself with the honors of the school; but as soon as he prescribes on the principles of Hahnemann, he is not to be adjudged capable of setting a collar-bone. By virtue of his therapeutic views he has become disqualified for professional recognition. So, by virtue of one's religious views, the man or woman of orthodox convictions, whatever one's proportion of personal culture, is regarded with a gentle superiority, as being of a class still enslaved in superstition, and therefore per se barbaric.

Put in undecorated language, this is about the sum and substance of a state of feeling which all intelligent evangelical Christians recognize perfectly in those who have preempted for themselves the claims belonging to what are called the liberal faiths.

On the other hand, one who is regarded as a little of a heretic from the sterner sects, may make the warmest friendships of a lifetime among "the world's people" ---whom far be it from me to seem to dispossess of any of their manifold charms.

This brings me closely to a question which I am so often asked, either directly or indirectly, that I cannot easily pass this Andover chapter by without some recognition of it.

What was, in very truth, the effect of such a religious training as Andover gave her children?

Curious impressions used to be afloat about us among people of easier faiths ; often, I think, we were supposed to spend our youth paddling about in a lake of blue fire, or in committing the genealogies to memory, or in gasping beneath the agonies of religious revivals.

To be quite honest, I should say that I have not retained all the beliefs which I was taught ---who does? But I have retained the profoundest respect for the way in which I was taught them ; and I would rather have been taught what I was, as I was, and run whatever risks were involved in the process, than to have been taught much less, little, or nothing. An excess of religious education may have its unfortunate aspects. But a deficiency of it has worse.

It is true that, for little people, our little souls were a good deal agitated on the question of eternal salvation. We were taught that heaven and hell followed life and death; that the one place was "a desirable location," and the other too dreadful to be mentioned in ears polite; and that what Matthew Arnold calls "conduct" was the deciding thing. Not that we heard much, until we grew old enough to read for ourselves, about Matthew Arnold; but we did hear a great deal about plain behavior --- unselfishness, integrity, honor, sweet temper---the simple good morals of childhood.

We were taught, too, to respect prayer and the Christian Bible. In this last particular we never had at all an oppressive education.

My Sunday-school reminiscences are few and comfortable, and left me, chiefly, with the impression that Sunday-schools always studied Acts; for I do not recall any lessons given me by strolling theologues in any other --- certainly none in any severer --- portions of the Bible.

It was all very easy and pleasant, if not feverishly stimulating; and I am quite willing to match my Andover Sunday-school experiences with that of a Boston free-thinker's little daughter who came home and complained to her mother : "There is a dreadful girl put into our Sunday-school. I think, mamma, she is bad society for me. She says the Bible is exaggerated, and then she tickles my legs!"

I have said that we were taught to think something about our own "salvation;" and so we were, but not in a manner calculated to burden the good spirits of any but a very sensitive or introspective child. Personally, I may have dwelt on the idea, at times, more than was good for my happiness; but certainly no more than was good for my character. The idea of character was at the basis of everything we did, or dreamed, or learned.

There is a scarecrow which "liberal" beliefs put together, hang in the field of public terror or ridicule, and call it Orthodoxy. Of this misshapen creature we knew nothing in Andover.

Of hell we heard sometimes, it is true, for Andover Seminary believed in it -though, be it said, much more comfortably in the days before this iron doctrine became the bridge of contention in the recent serious, theological battle which has devastated Andover. In my own case, I do not remember to have been shocked or threatened by this woful doctrine. I knew that my father believed in the everlasting misery of wicked people who could be good if they wanted to, but would not; and I was, of course, accustomed to accept the beliefs of a parent who represented everything that was tender, unselfish, pure, and noble, to my mind -in fact, who sustained to me the ideal of a fatherhood which gave me the best conception I shall ever get, in this world, of the Fatherhood of God. My father presented the interesting anomaly of a man holding, in one dark particular, a severe faith, but displaying in his private character rare tenderness and sweetness of heart. He would go out of his way to save a crawling thing from death, or any sentient thing from pain. He took more trouble to give comfort or to prevent distress to every breathing creature that came within his reach, than any other person whom I have ever known. He had not the heart to witness heart-ache. It was impossible for him to endure the sight of a child's suffering. His sympathy was an extra sense, finer than eyesight, more exquisite than touch. Yet he did believe that absolute perversion of moral character went to its "own place," and bore the consequence of its own choice.

Once I told a lie (I was seven years old), and my father was a broken-hearted man. He told me then that liars went to hell. I do not remember to have heard any such personal application of the doctrine of eternal punishment before or since; and the fact made a life-long impression, to which I largely owe a personal preference for veracity. Yet, to analyze the scene strictly, I must say that it was not fear of torment which so moved me; it was the sight of that broken face. For my father wept --- only when death visited the household did I ever see him cry again ---and I stood melted and miserable before his anguish and his love. The devil and all his angels could not have punished into me the noble shame of that moment.

I have often been aware of being pitied by outsiders for the theological discipline which I was supposed, to have received in Andover; but I must truthfully say that I have never been conscious of needing compassion in this respect. I was taught that God is Love, and Christ His Son is our Saviour; that the important thing in life was to be that kind of woman for which there is really, I find, no better word than Christian, and that the only road to this end was to be trodden by way of character. The ancient Persians (as we all know) were taught to hurl a javelin, ride a horse, and speak the truth.

I was taught that I should speak the truth, say my prayers, and consider other people; it was a wholesome, right-minded, invigorating training that we had, born of tenderness, educated conscience, and good sense, and I have lived to bless it in many troubled years.

What if we did lend a little too much romance now and then to our religious "experience"? It was better for us than some other kinds of romance to which we were quite as liable. What if I did "join the church" (entirely of my own urgent will, not of my father's preference or guiding) at the age of twelve, when the great dogmas to which I was expected to subscribe could not possibly have any rational meaning for me? I remember how my father took me apart, and gently explained to me beforehand the clauses of the rather simple and truly beautiful chapel creed which he himself, I believe, had written to modernize and clarify the old one --- I wonder if it were done at that very time? And I remember that it all seemed to me very easy and happy---signifying chiefly, that one meant to be a good girl, if possible. What if one did conduct a voluminous religious correspondence with the other professor's daughter, who put notes under the fence which divided our homes? We were none the worse girls for that. And we outgrew it, when the time came.

One thing, supremely, I may say that I learned from the Andover life, or, at least, from the Andover home. That was an everlasting scorn of worldliness --- I do not mean in the religious sense of the word. That tendency to seek the lower motive, to do the secondary thing, to confuse sounds or appearances with values, which is covered by the word as we commonly use it, very early came to seem to me a way of looking at life for which I know no other term than underbred.

There is no better training for a young person than to live in the atmosphere of a study ---we did not call it a library, in my father's home. People of leisure who read might have libraries. People who worked among their books had studies.

The life of a student, with its gracious peace, its beauty, its dignity, seemed to me, as the life of social preoccupation or success may seem to children born to that penumbra, the inevitable thing.

As one grew to think out life for one's self, one came to perceive a width and sanctity in the choice of work --- whether rhetoric or art, theology or sculpture, hydraulics or manufacture---but to work, to work hard, to see work steadily, and see it whole, was the way to be reputable. I think I always respected a good blacksmith more than a lady of leisure.

I know it took me a while to recover from a very youthful and amusing disinclination to rich people, which was surely never trained into me, but grew like the fruit of the horse-chestnut trees, ruggedly, of nature, and of Andover Hill; and which dropped away when its time came---just about as useless as the big, brown nuts which we cut into baskets and carved into trustees' faces for a mild November day, and then threw away.

When I came in due time to observe that property and a hardened character were not identical, and that families of ease in which one might happen to visit were not deficient in education because their incomes were large --- I think it was at first with a certain sense of surprise. It is impossible to convey to one differently reared the delicious naïveté of this state of mind.

Whatever the "personal peculiarities" of our youthful conceptions of life, as acquired at Andover, one thing is sure---that we grew into love of reality as naturally as the Seminary elms shook out their long, green plumes in May, and shed their delicate, yellow leaves in October.

I can remember no time when we did not instinctively despise a sham, and honor a genuine person, thing, or claim. In mere social pretension not built upon character, intelligence, education, or gentle birth, we felt no interest. I do not remember having been taught this, in so many words. It came without teaching.

My father taught me most things without text-books or lessons. By far the most important portion of what one calls education I owe to him; yet he never preached, or prosed, or played the pedagogue. He talked a great deal, not to us, but with us; we began to have conversation while we were still playing marbles and dolls. I remember hours of discussion with him on some subject so large that the littleness of his interlocutor must have tried him sorely. Time and eternity, theology and science, literature and art, invention and discovery, came each in its turn; and, while I was still making burr baskets, or walking fences, or coasting (standing up) on what I was proud to claim as the biggest sled in town, down the longest hills, and on the fastest local record---I was fascinated with the wealth and variety which seem to have been the conditions of thought with him. I have never been more interested by anything in later life than I was in my father's conversation.

I never attended a public school of any kind---unless we except the Sunday-school that studied Acts---and when it came time for me to pass from the small to the large private schools of Andover, the same paternal comradeship continued to keep step with me.

There was no college diploma for girls of my kind in my day; but we came as near to it as we could.

There was a private school in Andover, of wide reputation in its time, known to the irreverent as the "Nunnery," but bearing in professional circles the more stately name of Mrs. Edwards's School for Young Ladies. Two day-scholars, as a marked favor to their parents, were admitted with the boarders elect; and of these two I was one. If I remember correctly, Professor Park and my father were among the advisers whose opinions had weight with the selection of our course of study, and I often wonder how, with their rather feudal views of women, these two wise men of Andover managed to approve so broad a curriculum.

Possibly the quiet and modest learned lady, our principal, had ideas of her own which no one could have suspected her of obtruding against the current of her times and environment; like other strong and gentle women she may have had her "way" when nobody thought so. At all events, we were taught wisely and well, in directions to which the fashionable girls' schools of the day did not lift an eye-lash.

I was an out-of-door girl, always into every little mischief of snow or rainfall, flower, field, or woods or ice; but in spite of skates and sleds and tramps and all the west winds from Wachusett that blew through me, soul and body, I was not strong; and my father found it necessary to oversee my methods of studying. Incidentally, I think, he influenced the choice of some of our text-books, and I remember that, with the exception of Greek and trigonometry ---thought, in those days, to be beyond the scope of the feminine intellect---we pursued the same curriculum that our brothers did at college. In some cases we had teachers who were then, or afterwards, college professors in their specialties; in all departments I think we were faithfully taught, and that our tastes and abilities were electively recognized.

I was not allowed, I remember, to inflict myself upon the piano for more than one hour a day; my father taking the ground that, as there was only so much of a girl, if she had not unusual musical gift and had less than usual physical vigor, she had better give the best of herself to her studies. I have often blessed him for this daring individualism; for, while the school "practice" went on about me, in the ordinary way, so many precious hours out of a day that was all too short for better things - I was learning my lessons quite comfortably, and getting plenty of fresh air and exercise between whiles.

I hasten to say that I was not at all a remarkable scholar. I cherished a taste for standing near the top of the class, somewhere, and always preferred rather to answer a question than to miss it; but this, I think, was pure pride, rather than an absorbing, intellectual passion. It was a wholesome pride, however, and served me a good turn.

At one epoch of history, so far back that I cannot date it, I remember to have been a scholar at Abbot Academy long enough to learn how to spell. Perhaps one ought to give the honor of this achievement where honor is due. When I observe the manner in which the superior sex is often turned out by masculine diplomas upon the world with the life-long need of a vest-pocket dictionary or a spelling-book, I cherish a respect for the method in which I was compelled to spell the English language. It was severe, no doubt. We stood in a class of forty, and lost our places for the misfit of a syllable, a letter, a definition, or even a stumble in elocution. I remember once losing the head of the class for saying: L-u-ux --- Lux. It was a terrible blow, and I think of it yet with burning mortification on my cheeks.

In the "Nunnery" we were supposed to have learned how to spell. We studied what we called Mental Philosophy, to my unqualified delight; and Butler's Analogy, which I considered a luxury; and Shakespeare, whom I distantly but never intimately adored; Latin, to which dead language we gave seven years apiece out of our live girlhood; "Picciola" and "Undine," Racine, and Schiller, we dreamed over in the grove and the orchard; English literature is associated with the summer-house and the grape arbor, with flecks of shade and glints of light, and a sense of unmistakable privilege. There was physiology, which was scarcely work, and astronomy, which I found so exhilarating that I fell ill over it. Alas! truth compels me to add that Mathematics, with a big M and stretching on through the books of Euclid, darkened my young horizon with dull despair; and that chemistry---but the facts are too humiliating to relate. My father used to say that all he ever got out of the pursuit of this useful science in his college days ---and he was facile valedictorian---was the impression that there was a sub-acetate of something dissolved in a powder at the bottom.

All that I am able to recall of the study of "my brother's text-books," in this department, is that there was once a frightful odor in the laboratory, for which Professor Hitchcock and a glass jar and a chemical were responsible, and that I said, "At least, the name of this will remain with me to my dying hour." But what was the name of it? "Ask me no more."

In the department of history I can claim no results more calculated to reflect credit upon the little student who hated a poor recitation much, but facts and figures more. To the best of my belief, I can be said, to have retained but two out of the long list of historic dates with which my quivering-memory was duly and properly crowded.

I do know when America was discovered, because the year is inscribed over a spring in the seaside town where I have spent twenty summers, and I have driven past it on an average once a day for that period of time. And I can tell when Queen Elizabeth left this world, because Macaulay wrote a stately sentence ---

It must have-been the year when my father read De Quincey and Wordsworth to me on winter evenings that I happened for myself on Elizabeth Barrett Browning. The first little event opened for me, as distinctly as if I had never heard of it before, the world of letters as a Paradise from which no flaming sword could ever exile me; but the second revealed to me my own nature.

The Andover sunsets blazed behind Wachusett, and between the one window of my little room and the fine head of the mountain nothing intervened. The Andover elms held above lifted eyes arch upon arch of exquisite tracery, through which the far sky looked down like some noble thing that one could spend all one's life in trying to reach, and be happy just because it existed, whether one reached it or not.

The paths in my father's great gardens burned white in the summer moonlights, and their shape was the shape of a mighty cross. The June lilies, yellow and sweet, lighted their soft lamps beside the cross --- I was sixteen, and I read "Aurora Leigh."

A grown person may smile ---but, no; no gentle-minded man or woman smiles at the dream of a girl. What has life to offer that is nobler in enthusiasm, more delicate, more ardent, more true to the unseen and the unsaid realities which govern our souls, or leave us sadder forever because they do not? There may be greater poems in our language than "Aurora Leigh," but it was many years before it was possible for me to suppose it; and none that ever saw the hospitality of fame could have done for that girl what that poem did at that time. I had never a good memory but I think I could have repeated a large portion of it; and know that I often stood the test of haphazard examinations on the poem from half-scoffing friends, sometimes of the masculine persuasion. Each to his own; and what Shakespeare or the Latin Fathers might have done for some other impressionable girl, Mrs. Browning ---forever bless her strong and gentle name---did for me.

I owe to her, distinctly, the first visible aspiration (ambition is too low a word) to do some honest, hard work of my own in the World Beautiful, and for it.

It is April, and it is the year 1861. It is a dull morning at school. The sky is gray. The girls are not in spirits---no one knows just why. The morning mail is late, and the Boston papers are tardily distributed. The older girls get them, and are reading the head-lines lazily, as girls do; not, in truth, caring much about a newspaper, but aware that one must be well-informed.

Suddenly, in the recitation room, where I am refreshing my accomplishments in some threatening lesson, I hear low murmurs and exclamations. Then a girl, very young and very pretty, catches the paper and whirls it overhead. With a laugh which tinkles through my ears to this day, she dances through the room and cries: ---

"War's begun! War's begun!"

An older girl utters a cry of horror, and puts her hand upon the little creature's thoughtless lips.

"Oh, how can you?" so I hear the older girl. "Hush, hush, hush !"