my hot cheeks, and looked up into the boughs, and
listened to the many, many birds that seemed chattering to each other
in a language of their own. What was it they were saying? and why could
not I understand it? Perhaps I should, sometime. I had read of people
who did, in fairy tales.

When the others started homeward, I followed. I did not mind their
calling me lazy, nor that my father gave me only one tarnished copper
cent, while Lida received two or three bright ones. I had had what I
wanted most. I would rather sit under the apple-trees and hear the
birds sing than have a whole handful of bright copper pennies. It was
well for my father and his garden that his other children were not like
me.

The work which I was born to, but had not begun to do, was sometimes a
serious weight upon my small, forecasting brain.

One of my hymns ended with the lines,--

"With books, and work, and healthful play,
May my first years be passed,
That I may give, for every day,
Some good account at last."

I knew all about the books and the play; but the work,--how should I
ever learn to do it?

My father had always strongly emphasized his wish that all his
children, girls as well as boys, should have some independent means of
self-support by the labor of their hands; that every one should, as was
the general custom, "learn a trade." Tailor's work--the finishing of
men's outside garments--was the trade learned most frequently by women
in those days, and one or more of my older sisters worked at it; I
think it must have been at home, for I somehow or somewhere got the
idea, while I was a small child, that the chief end of woman was to
make clothing for mankind.

This thought came over me with a sudden dread one Sabbath morning when
I was a toddling thing, led along by my sister, behind my father and
mother. As they walked arm in arm before me, I lifted my eyes from my
father's heels to his head, and mused: "How tall he is! and how long
his coat looks! and how many thousand, thousand stitches there must be
in his coat and pantaloons! And I suppose I have got to grow up and
have a husband, and put all those little stitches into his coats and
pantaloons. Oh, I never, never can do it!" A shiver of utter
discouragement went through me. With that task before me, it hardly
seemed to me as if life were worth living. I went on to meeting, and I
suppose I forgot my trouble in a hymn, but for the moment it was real.
It was not th