and was so quick at her lessons that
in two years she went back to Worcester and opened a school for little
children. She was only fourteen and rather small for her age, so she
put on long dresses and piled her hair on top of her head with a high
comb. I think people never guessed how young she was. Anyway, she proved
a good teacher, and the children loved her and never disobeyed her.

After keeping this school for a year, she studied again in Boston until
she was nineteen. Then she not only taught a day and boarding-school in
that city, but looked after her brothers and opened another school for
poor children whose parents could not afford to pay for their lessons.
She took care of her grandmother's house, too. While every one was
wondering how one young girl could do so much, she made them open their
eyes still wider by writing three or four books.

By and by her health broke down, and she began to think that she could
never work any more, but after a long rest in England she came back to
America and did something far greater than teaching or writing--she went
through the whole country making prisons, jails, and asylums more
comfortable. Up to the time of Dorothea Dix's interest, no one had
seemed to bother his head about prisoners and insane people. Any kind of
a place that had a lock and key was good enough for such to sleep in.
And what did it matter if a wicked man or a crazy man _was_ cold or
hungry? But it mattered very much to Dorothea Dix that human beings were
being ill-treated, and she meant to start a reform. She talked with
senators, governors, and presidents. She visited the places in each
State where prisoners, the poor, and the crazy were shut up. She talked
kindly to these shut-ins, and she talked wrathfully to the men who
ill-treated them. She made speeches before legislatures; she wrote
articles for the papers, and begged money from millionaires to build
healthy almshouses and asylums. This was seventy years ago, when
traveling was slow and dangerous in the west and south. She had so many
delays on account of stage-coaches breaking down on rough or muddy roads
that finally she made a practice of carrying with her an outfit of
hammer, wrench, nails, screws, a coil of stout rope, and straps of
strong leather. Some of the western rivers had to be forded, and many
times she nearly lost her life. Once, when riding in a stage-coach in
Michigan, a robber sprang out of a dark place in the forest through
wh