ience.

Meanwhile, the daily lessons to her father or to a private tutor went
on; Virgil, Horace and Ovid were read in due course, and the study of
Greek was begun. Margaret never forgave her father for robbing her of
a proper childhood and substituting a premature scholastic education.
"I certainly do not wish," she says, "that instead of these masters, I
had read baby books, written down to children, but I do wish that I
had read no books at all till later,--that I had lived with toys and
played in the open air."

Her early and solitary development entailed disadvantages which only a
very thoughtful parent could have foreseen. When, later, Margaret was
sent to school, she had no companions in study, being in advance of
the girls of her age, with whom she played, and too young for the
older set with whom she was called to recite. "Not only," she says, "I
was not their schoolmate, but my book-life and lonely habits had given
a cold aloofness to my whole expression, and veiled my manner with a
hauteur which turned all hearts away."

The effects of her training upon her health, Margaret appears to have
exaggerated. She thought it had "checked her growth, wasted her
constitution," and would bring her to a "premature grave." While her
lessons to her father by candle-light continued, there were
sleeplessness, bad dreams, and morning headaches, but after this had
gone on one year, Mr. Fuller was elected to Congress, spent most of
his time in Washington, and a private tutor gave the lessons,
presumably at seasonable hours. No one with a "broken constitution"
could have performed her later literary labors, and she was not
threatened with a "premature grave" when Dr. Frederick Henry Hedge
made her acquaintance in Cambridge society. "Margaret," he says, "was
then about thirteen,--a child in years, but so precocious in her
mental and physical development, that she passed for eighteen or
twenty. Agreeably to this estimate, she had her place in society as a
full-grown lady. When I recall her personal appearance as she was
then, and for ten or twelve years subsequent, I have the idea of a
blooming girl of florid complexion and vigorous health, with a
tendency to robustness of which she was painfully conscious, and
which, with little regard to hygienic principles, she endeavored to
suppress and conceal, thereby preparing for herself much future
suffering." She had, he says, "no pretensions to beauty then, or at
any time," yet she