ved herself a very woman after all,
and fell as the meanest of her sisters might."

The latter sentences refer to Margaret's marriage to Ossoli, a man some
ten years the junior of his gifted wife, and by no means her
intellectual equal. That the marriage was a strange one even Margaret's
most ardent friends admit, but it was none the less exceedingly human
and very natural, as Hawthorne implies, for a woman of thirty-seven,
whose interests had long been of the strictly intellectual kind, to
yield herself at last to the impulses of an affectionate nature.

But we are getting very much ahead of our story, which should begin, of
course, far back in May, 1810, when there was born, at the corner of
Eaton and Cherry Streets, in Cambridgeport, a tiny daughter to Timothy
Fuller and his wife. The dwelling in which Margaret first saw the light
still stands, and is easily recognised by the three elms in front,
planted by the proud father to celebrate the advent of his first child.

The garden in which Margaret and her mother delighted has long since
vanished; but the house still retains a certain dignity, though now
divided into three separate tenements, numbered respectively 69, 72, and
75 Cherry Street, and occupied by a rather migratory class of tenants.
The pillared doorway and the carved wreaths above it still give an
old-fashioned grace to the somewhat dilapidated house.

[Illustration: FULLER HOUSE, CAMBRIDGEPORT, MASS.]

The class with which Margaret may be said to have danced through Harvard
College was that of 1829, which has been made by the wit and poetry
of Holmes the most eminent class that ever left Harvard. The memory of
one lady has preserved for us a picture of the girl Margaret as she
appeared at a ball when she was sixteen.

"She had a very plain face, half-shut eyes, and hair curled all over her
head; she was dressed in a badly-cut, low-neck pink silk, with white
muslin over it; and she danced quadrilles very awkwardly, being withal
so near-sighted that she could hardly see her partner."

With Holmes she was not especially intimate, we learn, though they had
been schoolmates; but with two of the most conspicuous members of the
class--William Henry Channing and James Freeman Clarke--she formed a
lifelong friendship, and these gentlemen became her biographers.

Yet, after all, the most important part of a woman's training is that
which she obtains from her own sex, and of this Margaret Fuller had
quite h