which characterizes our period. By all that
thought is "advanced," it tends to isolation:
and those who in the middle half of the last
century were avowedly of the anti-slavery
and religiously unorthodox type were in so
far accounted peculiar people.
"I well recall tiiat, when a little girl, the wonder to nie was that, while our associates went only to fine halls, where were music and gayety, we children were taken up into strange halls in second stories, where few and mostly elderly people were gatheretl, to listen to sad tales of oppressed peoples far away, where once I re- call the speaker, William Lloyd Garrison, who stood on steps from which he tokl us that men, women, and children had been sold like cattle. In later years I looked back upon these meetings and knew that the 'upper chambers' in which master spirits are called to meet their disciples were not all in the far- back centuries, and that I had been privileged to look into a face illumined by the Christ spirit."
In the prevalence of organization to-day, notably that of women, all this is correcting itself and working for the advancement of humanity to a degree far beyond our ken.
" My parents were Universal ists, but were not church members. As president of the one sociological movement of the church at the time, the ladies' sewing society, my mother was asked why she and my father did not join the church. Her reply was, "Do I not work as cordially with you as if I did?" Being far- ther pressed, she said, "To-day I am with you in your fundamental beliefs, but I don't know where I shall be to-morrow. There is much yet to learn, and I am mentally and spirit- ually on the inarch, and, if I join you, you will want to hold me back; so I must be free of any bonds, that I may follow my leading without hindrance." Later on, however, she with a very few women friends formed an organization for discussion or formal debate of the leading questions of the day. So far as I can ascertain, this was the first organization of the sort in the city of Lowell.
My sister and I were the younger members. My sister was of an artistic temperament anrl a deep spiritual nature. While self-distrustful to shyness, a strong dramatic instinct had its way, and drew her first upon the platform as a reader, by preference of Shakespeare, where she was received with distinguished favor. She one day surprised the family by saying, " I shall never do justice to the author, the art, or even to myself, until I can lose my- self in a single character." This finally led to some months' study under W. H. Sedley Smith, of the Boston Museum, and her debut under Manager Ellsler, in Cleveland, OJiio, in the part of Juliet, and an offer of a week's engagement in the parts of Parthenia, Bianca, Evadne, and Juliet, which followed her debut in Boston. William 'arren, who observed her critically from the floor, said to her friends:
"Anything I can do for that young lady I am ready to do. She will succeed." And she did. But, alas, her delicate constitution seemed to be threatened by the strain inseparable from her strenuous art; and, to allay the anxiety of her mother, she surrendered this art, to which every instinct of her nature called her, as she would have buried a lost love. She died in 1902. In connection with this beautiful life Miss Eastman says: —
"I count it first of all chiefest of felicities
To have a spirit poised, and calm, and whole,
And next in order of felicities
I hold it to have walked with such a soul."
Miss Eastman's education in earlier girlhood was received mainly in the public schools of Lowell, whose limitations were supplemented at the same time by instruction in private classes in drawing, painting, horseback riding, dancing, and later in the Lewis gymnastics. The public course ended with the excellent high school. So far as careful investigation by Miss Eastman could go some years since, she concluded that to Lowell belongs the honor of being the first city in the whole country to open a high school for girls as well as boys. General Benjamin F. Butler was of the first class, and well remembered Miss Eastman as his one girl classmate, of whom he kept track for some time.
It was with poignant grief to the family of Miss Eastman, as well as to herself, that, when the high school course of instruction ended,
