ar to the immature students.

"In her shady retirement, too, she was a sort of Egeria to certain men
of genius, who came to read to her their writings, to consult her in
their arguments, and to discuss with her the literature and politics of
the day,--through all which her mind moved with an equal step, yet with
a sprightliness and vivacity peculiarly feminine.

"Her memory was remarkably retentive, not only of the contents of books,
but of all that great outlying fund of anecdote and story which the
quaint and earnest New England life always supplied. There were pictures
of peculiar characters, legends of true events stranger than romance,
all stored in the cabinets of her mind; and these came from her lips
with the greater force because the precision of her memory enabled her
to authenticate them with name, date, and circumstances of vivid
reality. From that shadowy line of incidents which marks the twilight
boundary between the spiritual world and the present life she drew
legends of peculiar clearness, but invested with the mysterious charm
which always dwells in that uncertain region; and the shrewd flash of
her eye, and the keen, bright smile with which she answered the
wondering question, 'What _do_ you suppose it was?' or, 'What could it
have been?' showed how evenly rationalism in her mind kept pace with
romance.

"The retired room in which she thus read, studied, thought, and surveyed
from afar the whole world of science and literature, and in which she
received friends and entertained children, was perhaps the dearest and
freshest spot to her in the world. There came a time, however, when the
neat little independent establishment was given up, and she went to
associate herself with two of her nieces in keeping house for a
boarding-school of young girls. Here her lively manners and her gracious
interest in the young made her a universal favorite, though the cares
she assumed broke in upon those habits of solitude and study which
formed her delight. From the day that she surrendered this independency
of hers, she had never, for more than a score of years, a home of her
own, but filled the trying position of an accessory in the home of
others. Leaving the boarding-school, she became the helper of an invalid
wife and mother in the early nursing and rearing of a family of young
children,--an office which leaves no privacy and no leisure. Her bed was
always shared with some little one; her territories were expose