stie, a young girl of Scotch descent, was
a member of our family circle. She taught us French, music, and dancing.
Our days were too short for all we had to do, for our time was not
wholly given to pleasure. We were required to keep our rooms in order,
mend and make our clothes, and do our own ironing. The latter was one of
my mother's politic requirements, to make our laundry lists as short as
possible.

Ironing on hot days in summer was a sore trial to all of us; but Miss
Christie, being of an inventive turn of mind, soon taught us a short way
out of it. She folded and smoothed her undergarments with her hands and
then sat on them for a specified time. We all followed her example and
thus utilized the hours devoted to our French lessons and, while reading
"Corinne" and "Telemaque," in this primitive style we ironed our
clothes. But for dresses, collars and cuffs, and pocket handkerchiefs,
we were compelled to wield the hot iron, hence with these articles we
used all due economy, and my mother's object was thus accomplished.

As I had become sufficiently philosophical to talk over my religious
experiences calmly with my classmates who had been with me through the
Finney revival meetings, we all came to the same conclusion--that we had
passed through no remarkable change and that we had not been born again,
as they say, for we found our tastes and enjoyments the same as ever. My
brother-in-law explained to us the nature of the delusion we had all
experienced, the physical conditions, the mental processes, the church
machinery by which such excitements are worked up, and the impositions
to which credulous minds are necessarily subjected. As we had all been
through that period of depression and humiliation, and had been
oppressed at times with the feeling that all our professions were arrant
hypocrisy and that our last state was worse than our first, he helped us
to understand these workings of the human mind and reconciled us to the
more rational condition in which we now found ourselves. He never grew
weary of expounding principles to us and dissipating the fogs and mists
that gather over young minds educated in an atmosphere of superstition.

We had a constant source of amusement and vexation in the students in my
father's office. A succession of them was always coming fresh from
college and full of conceit. Aching to try their powers of debate on
graduates from the Troy Seminary, they politely questioned all our
the