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54 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—

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