Page:Famous Living Americans, with Portraits.djvu/41

 22 FAMOUS LIVING AMERICANS flonr and the enchantment of dusky light. The country about the little village was filled with spots of beauty and charm for her and her stepbrother. Summer after summer they ex- plored the surrounding neighborhood and found many spots which called forth their childish but poetic fancies. Flowers and trees and birds, evening sounds, and the splendor of the rainbow roused in them the spirit of joy and reverence. Upon an altar which they had erected they placed all the snakes which they killed and sometimes brought a share of their spoils of nuts or a favorite book as an offering to the God of the Universe. To repeat the Lord^s Prayer in English lacked the decidedly religious flavor ; so they learned it in Latin and repeated it every night. Thus does natural childhood ever long for some ceremonial to express its inherent religiousness. In emulation of her father she attempted to read through his library, beginning with Pope *s Iliad. This proved unsat- isfactory and she compromised by reading a bulky History of the World. About this time, perhaps, she began reading Plu- tarch 's Lives (under the stimulus of the reward of five cents for each **Life** which she could intelligently report to her father), and Irving 's Life of Washington (at the rate of twenty-five cents per volume). This introductory reading in history developed into a real liking, so that while she was in boarding school she spent one summer in reading Gibbon *s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire^ not only reading it but successfully withstanding the bombardment of test ques- tions given by her skeptical schoohnates. The year 1877 found Miss Addams at Rockford Seminary, and she was one of the first four young women to receive a de- gree upon its becoming Rockford College. Here she found the spirit of earnestness which is characteristic of pioneer in- stitutions and into which she entered with eager intensity. Illustrative of her effort to understand and appreciate the opening world of human experience is the effort which she and four other students made to understand DeQuincey's Dreams. This was nothing less than an attempt to drug themselves with opium. Not only did they fail to experience any exhilaration from the numerous opium powders, but the