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 impressions of poetry, and soon began making little verses for her own amusement. In later years she had heard at Pearson's portions of Shakespeare read aloud, and when she had ventured to read a little for herself, the world seemed everywhere so full of meaning, except in her step-father's house. Here at Pearson's, too, her education had been advanced and her faculties quickened by the judiciously narrated history of her own times and those troublous ones that preceded it, told by Robert's mother, now a very aged woman with weakened body, but with mind and memory unimpaired.

It is true, her mother had made Ruth's life a most pleasant one while she was yet a child, and now the boundless love of the daughter for her mother made Ruth's life far from irksome while at home, but in spite of it all there was a constant longing for a wider outlook that could not be repressed; and the failure to discover that wickedness reputed among the "world's people," as all non-Quakers were called, had made her sceptical concerning the wisdom embodied in Fox's