ble woman's.

Louise Amelia Knapp Smith Clappe came to light in Elizabeth, New
Jersey, in 1819. Her father, Moses Smith, was a man of high scholarly
attainment, and by her mother, Lois Lee, she could claim an equally
gifted ancestry, and a close kinship with Julia Ward Howe. As a young
girl, together with several brothers and sisters, she was left
parentless, but there was a comfortable estate, and a faithful
guardian, the Hon. Osman Baker, a Member of Congress I believe, who saw
to it that they received the very best mental and physical training.
Shirley was educated at Amherst and Charlestown, Massachusetts, and at
Amherst was the family home.

At that day the epistolary art was a finished accomplishment, and in
childhood she evidenced a ready use of the quill pen. Later on, she
maintained correspondence with brilliant minds, who challenged her to
her best. At the same time she was pursuing her English studies, to
which were added French, German, and Italian. She had but little time
for the trivial social amenities, but her frequent missives from her
relatives, the Lees and Wards of New York City and Boston, and her
enjoyable visits to their gay homes, broke the strain of mental grind,
and kept her in touch with the fashionable world. Her communications in
the forties disclose a relation to men and women of culture, whose
letters are colorful of people, places, and events, and through them we
reach an intimate inside of her own self. Those faded, musty-smelling
epistles, with pressed flowers, from an old attic, reveal a rich kind
of distinct and charming personalities.

Shirley, small, fair, and golden-haired, was not physically strong, and
her careful guardian often ordered a change of climate. Sometimes she
sojourned in the South. In her migrations she might employ a carriage,
or venture on a canal-boat, but usually the stage-coach carried her. It
was on one of those bits of travel that she met Mr. A. H. Everett of
Massachusetts, a brother of Edward Everett, a noted author, and popular
throughout the country as a lecturer. He had been charge d'affaires in
the Netherlands, and minister to Spain. An intimate relationship,
chiefly by correspondence, was established between this gifted girl and
this brilliant gentleman. His long letters from Louisiana sometimes
were written wholly in French. From Washington, D.C., he writes that
the mission of United States minister to a foreign court has been
offered him, but it fai