Page:Women worth emulating (1877) Internet Archive.djvu/58

42 walls, or with the neighbours' children, in which I seldom could join; and often stood freezing on the shore to see my brother skating till he chose to go home. In short, there was no one who cared anything about me."

A sad testimony. This doubtless had the effect of concentrating her affection on the one brother who did care something for her. Her father, too, she always remembered with great tenderness, for he perceived some talent in the child, and taught her a little music and singing,—not with his wife's concurrence. Mrs. Herschel was a toil-worn mother, wearied with her necessary household tasks. She saw that her eldest daughter's education had not made her helpful, but the reverse; that her elder sons' talents were likely to cause them, as they did, to leave their native land in search of a wider sphere; therefore she was resolute to prevent little Caroline having any but the humblest and plainest instruction—what the school laws prescribed, and no more.

Thus there was the greatest impediment to Caroline's mental progress which could possibly exist. A child—a daughter especially—is so influenced by a mother's feelings and prejudices, that it is one of the marvels which real life supplies, more strangely than fiction can do, that this little hard-worked household drudge should have ever emerged from the gloom of her early condition. This it is which makes her life so valuable; what she was, quite as