e furnished. "I was reared in an atmosphere of high
intelligence. My father had uncommon mental vigor. So had my brothers.
Their daily habits and pursuits and pleasures, were intellectual, and
I naturally imbibed from them a kindred taste. Their talk was not of
beeves, nor of making money; that now universal passion had not
entered into men and possessed them as it does now, or if it had, it
was not in the sanctuary of our home,--there the money-changers did
not come."

The more we know of her home life, the less wonder we have at her
mental development. She says that "at the age of eight, my father,
whenever he was at home, kept me up and at his side till nine o'clock
in the evening, to listen to him while he read aloud to the family
Hume, or Shakspere, or Don Quixote, or Hudibras. Certainly I did not
understand them, but some glances of celestial light reached my soul,
and I caught from his magnetic sympathy some elevation of feeling, and
that love of reading which has been to me an education." A modern
girl is liable to nervous prostration without being kept up till nine
on such juvenile literature as Hume and Shakspere at the age of eight;
but Miss Sedgwick was a country girl who, in youth, lived out of doors
and romped like a boy and, at the age of fifty, led a party of young
nieces through France, Switzerland, and Italy, much of the way on foot
and always at their head. Always fortune's favorite, she enjoyed among
other things remarkably good health.

She thinks she was ten years old when she read Rollin's Ancient
History, spending the noon intermission, when of course she ought to
have been at play, out of sight under her desk, where she "read, and
munched, and forgot myself in Cyrus's greatness."

A winter in New York, where she afterward spent so much of her time,
was her first absence from home. She had a married sister there whose
husband was in government employ, and her oldest brother was there
studying law. She was eleven years old; the date was 1801; and her
business in New York seems to have been to attend a French Dancing
School of which at that era there was but one in the city. She saw her
first play, and used to dry the still damp newspaper, in her
eagerness to read the theatre announcements. She also experienced a
very severe humiliation. She, with her brother, Theodore, attended a
large dinner party at the house of a friend of her father. "Our host
asked me, the only stranger guest, which part o