sums for me (there were no black-boards then), while I wrote a novel in a series of letters, under the euphonious name of Eugenia Fitz Allen. The consequence is that, so far as arithmetic is concerned, I have been subject to perpetual mortifications ever since, and shudder to this day when any one asks me how much is seven times nine.
I never could remember the multiplication table, and, to heap coals of fire on its head in revenge, set it to rhyme. I wrote my school themes in rhyme, and instead of following “Beauty soon decays,” and “Cherish no ill designs,” in B and C, I surprised my teacher with—
“Beauties in vain their pretty eyes may roll,
Charms strike the sight, but merit wins the soul.”
My teacher, who at that period was more ambitious for me than I was for myself, initiated me into Latin, a great step for that period.
The desire to gratify a friend induced me to study Watts’s Logic. I did commit it to memory conscientiously, but on what an ungenial soil it fell! I think, to this day, that science is the dryest of intellectual chips, and for sorry quibblings, and self-evident propositions, syllogisms are only equalled by legal instruments, for which, by the way, I have lately seen a call for reform. Spirits of Locke, and Brown, and Whewell, forgive me!
About this period I walked four miles a week to Boston to join a private class in French.
The religious feeling was always powerful within me. I remember, in girlhood, a passionate joy in lonely prayer, and a delicious elevation, when with upraised look, I trod my chamber floor, reciting or singing Watts’s Sacred Lyrics. At sixteen I joined the Communion at the Episcopal Church in Cambridge.
At the age of eighteen I made another sacrifice in dress to purchase a Bible with a margin sufficiently large to enable me to insert a commentary. To this object I devoted several months of study, transferring to its pages my deliberate convictions.
I am glad to class myself with the few who first established the
