s, she had been at school, six months
at a time, a total of about one year. She had been mentioning two or
three novels, and then discourses as follows: "Novels are generally
supposed to be improper books for young people, as they take up the
time which ought to be employed in more useful pursuits; which is
certainly very true; but as a recreation to the mind, such books as
these cannot possibly do any hurt, as they are good moral lessons.
Indeed, I think there is scarcely any book from which some good may
not be derived; though it cannot be expected that any young person has
judgment enough to leave all the bad and take only the good, when
there is a great proportion of the former." Perhaps I am wrong in
thinking this an exhibition of remarkable reflection and expression in
a girl well under fifteen, whether she had been at school or
otherwise. Mrs. Ware was always a wonderful letter-writer, though, if
we take her word for it, she had little of her mother's gift as a
conversationalist. It seems to have been a life-long habit to see the
old year out and the new year in, spending the quiet hours in writing
letters to her friends. In one of these anniversary letters, written
when she was fifteen, she says, "I defy anyone to tell from my
appearance that I have not everything to make me happy. I have much
and am happy. My little trials are essential to my happiness." In that
last sentence we have the entire woman. Her trials were always, as she
thought, essential to her happiness.

On this principle, her next twelve years ought to have been very
happy, since they were sufficiently full of tribulation. The two years
following her mother's death, passed in the lonely home in Boston,
were naturally depressing. Besides, she was born for religion, and the
experience through which she had passed had created a great hunger in
her soul. Trinity Church, into which she had been baptized, had not
yet passed through the hands of Phillips Brooks, and its
ministrations, admirable as they are for the ordinary child, were
inadequate for the wants of a thoughtful girl like Mary Pickard. The
final effect was, she says, to throw her more upon herself and to
compel her to seek, "by reading, meditation and prayer, to find that
knowledge and stimulus to virtue which I failed to find in the
ministrations of the Sabbath."

At this critical period, she returned to the school at Hingham, which
she had left two years before, and there, in the Third