"was not plain," a reproach from which she was
saved "by her blond and abundant hair, by her excellent teeth, by her
sparkling, dancing, busy eyes," and by a "graceful and peculiar
carriage of her head and neck." He adds that "in conversation she had
already, at that early age, begun to distinguish herself, and made
much the same impression in society that she did in after years," but
that she had an excessive "tendency to sarcasm" which frightened shy
young people and made her notoriously unpopular with the ladies.

At this period Margaret attended a seminary for young ladies in
Boston. Cambridge was then, according to Col. Higginson, a vast,
sparsely settled village, containing between two and three thousand
inhabitants. In the Boston school, Dr. Hedge says, "the inexperienced
country girl was exposed to petty persecutions from the dashing misses
of the city," and Margaret paid them off by "indiscriminate sarcasms."

Margaret's next two years were spent at a boarding school in Groton.
Her adventures in this school are supposed to be narrated in her
dramatic story entitled "Mariana," in the volume called "Summer on the
Lakes." Mariana at first carried all before her "by her love of wild
dances and sudden song, her freaks of passion and wit," but abusing
her privileges, she is overthrown by her rebellious subjects, brought
to great humiliation, and receives some needed moral instructions.

At fifteen, Margaret returned to Cambridge and resumed her private
studies, except that, for a Greek recitation, she attended an academy
in which Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes was then fitting for college. Her
day at this period, as she gives it, was occupied thus: she rose
before five, walked an hour, and practiced at the piano till seven:
breakfasted and read French till eight; read Brown's philosophy, two
or three lectures, till half past nine; went to school and studied
Greek till twelve; recited, went home, and practiced till two; dined;
lounged half an hour, read two hours in Italian, walked or rode, and
spent her evenings leisurely with music or friends. Plainly she ought
to have been one of the learned women of her generation.

A school composition of Margaret impressed her fellow pupil, Dr.
Holmes, as he relates, with a kind of awe. It began loftily with the
words, "It is a trite remark," a phrase which seemed to the boy very
masterful. The girls envied her a certain queenliness of manner. "We
thought," says one of them, "that