admirable marksman.
Her room was a perfect museum. Here were birds, bats, beetles, snakes,
and toads; some dissected, some preserved in spirits, and others
stuffed, all gathered and prepared by her own hands. Now she made an
inkstand from the egg of a sea-gull and the body of a kingfisher; now
she climbed to the top of a tree and brought down a crow's nest. She
could walk miles upon miles with no fatigue. She grew up like a boy,
which is only another way of saying that she grew up healthy and
strong physically. Probably polite society was shocked at Dr. Hosmer's
methods. Would that there were many such fathers and mothers, that we
might have a vigorous race of women, and consequently, a vigorous race
of men!

When Harriet tired of books,--for she was an eager reader,--she found
delight in a clay-pit in the garden, where she molded horses and dogs
to her heart's content. Unused to restraint, she did not like
the first school at which she was placed, the principal, the
brother-in-law of Nathaniel Hawthorne, writing to her father that he
"could do nothing with her."

She was then taken to Mrs. Sedgwick, who kept a famous school at
Lenox, Berkshire County. She received "happy Hatty," as she was
called, with the remark, "I have a reputation for training wild
colts, and I will try this one." And the wise woman succeeded. She won
Harriet's confidence, not by the ten thousand times repeated "don't,"
which so many children hear in home and school, till life seems a
prison-pen. She let her run wild, guiding her all the time with so
much tact, that the girl scarcely knew she was guided at all. Blessed
tact! How many thousands of young people are ruined for lack of it!

She remained here three years. Mrs. Sedgwick says, "She was the most
difficult pupil to manage I ever had, but I think I never had one in
whom I took so deep an interest, and whom I learned to love so well."
About this time, not being quite as well as usual, Dr. Hosmer engaged
a physician of, large practice to visit his daughter. The busy man
could not be regular, which sadly interfered with Harriet's boating
and driving. Complaining one day that it spoiled her pleasure, he
said, "If I am alive, I will be here," naming the day and hour.

"Then if you are not here, I am to conclude that you are dead," was
the reply.

As he did not come, Harriet drove to the newspaper offices in Boston
that afternoon, and the next morning the community was startled to
read of D