Page:Famous Living Americans, with Portraits.djvu/608

 ELLA FLAGG YOUNG 585 for much of her early reading. She learned to read after she was eight years of age and refused to learn to write until she was nearly fourteen. Before she was ten she had committed to memory the Westminster Catechism and most of Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, the Epistle to the Corinthians, and the Psalms. The Call to the Unconverted^ by the Scotch Cov- enanter, Baxter, fell into her childish hands, and she read this until her mother found her out and replaced it with books more appropriate for her age. She tells with tenderness how her mother rescued her from the laughter of certain ladies calling at the house when she had expressed her own youthful notions gleaned from these strange books. ^^She took me seriously," says Mrs. Young, and this grateful recollection may be one reason for the serious consideration and respect which she herself shows to children. Her father was a man of keen insight, much interested in sci- ence, a taste which sometimes set him at issue with some of the orthodox dogmas of the church such as Predestination. He always took great interest in his daughter's education and accustomed her to discuss with him in the evening her studies of the day, questioning her keenly, and encouraging her to ex- press with freedom her own impressions and judgments and to test their soundness in daily life. From this atmosphere of religious and moral alertness and intellectual freedom, the keen, sensitive child gained habits of reflection and respect for the finer qualities of human life, and her mind was given a philosophical and scientific turn which later showed itself in the work she took up and the methods she used. Her professional preparation for teaching was made in the old Normal School of Chicago, whither her people had come to live. Her mother's fear lest she had been too much sep- ^ arated from children in her own childhood to be able to come into sympathy with them and so to become an acceptable teacher no doubt sharpened her determination to attain the proper equipment. At that time there was no school in which students in training to become teachers could practice teach- ing; ** practice schools" were unknown. Mrs. Young delights to tell how she made her own practice school. After normal