away from home and mother for the first time! The
beautiful wife of General Brooke, too, was so loving and considerate
in her motherly attentions to us that she completely won our hearts,
and when she died, some years afterward, we felt bereaved.

The voyage by schooner to Buffalo through the Straits of
Mich-e-li-mac-i-nac and tempestuous little Lake St. Clair, a day or
two at hoary, magnificent Niagara, the journey thence by stage, canal,
railroad and steamboat to New York, filled up one month from the time
we took our farewell look at the star spangled banner floating over
our far Western home. And this sixteen mile ride by rail from
Schenectady to Albany, which was over the first piece of road opened
for travel in the United States, seemed so like magic as to inspire us
with a kind of awe. I remember that in coming to a steep grade the
passengers alighted, while the train was drawn up the slope by some
kind of stationary machinery.

I recalled this experience of my girlhood a few years ago when, in a
luxurious palace car, a party of us wound up and over the Veta pass,
an ascent of 2,439 feet in fourteen miles, and looking down the dizzy
height, as the two powerful engines, puffing and snorting like living
creatures, labored to reach the summit, I marvelled at the splendid
triumph of genius and skill.

After a pleasant day or two at West Point, where we left the young
Cadet, and a short visit to relatives in New York, a most enjoyable
trip in a "Sound" steamer brought us to the "City of Elms," one of the
great educational centers of New England, which was to be my home for
two years.

There were many learned men in New Haven then, and the faculty of the
time-honored old college had on its roll names which will never die,
Day, Silliman, Olmstead, and many others,--who were mighty in
eloquence and theology, like Leonard Bacon and Dr. Taylor, proclaimed
the truth with no uncertain sound in the churches on the "Green" from
Sabbath to Sabbath. Grand old Noah Webster, standing in the doorway of
his modest home on our road from school to church, was, to me, an
embodiment of the spelling-book and dictionary, and I instinctively
made obeisance to him as we passed that way.

One of the few privileges granted me in the way of recreation while at
"Mrs. Apthorpe's School for Young Ladies" was an occasional visit to
our dear cousins, the Brewsters, who occupied a beautiful home on the
Sound, formerly known as the "Pavillion,