ere among the Zincali:--

"I'll joyfully labor, both night and day,
To aid my unfortunate brothers;
As a laundress tans her own face in the ray
To cleanse the garments of others."

It suggested a somewhat similar verse to my own mind. Why should not
our washerwoman's work have its touch of poetry also?--

This thought flashed by like a ray of light
That brightened my homely labor:--
The water is making my own hands white
While I wash the robes of my neighbor.

And how delighted we were with Mrs. Kirkland's "A New Home: Who'll
Follow?" the first real Western book I ever read. Its genuine
pioneer-flavor was delicious. And, moreover, it was a prophecy to
Sarah, Emilie, and myself, who were one day thankful enough to find an
"Aunty Parshall's dish-kettle" in a cabin on an Illinois prairie.

So the pleasantly occupied years slipped on, I still nursing my purpose
of a more systematic course of study, though I saw no near possibility
of its fulfillment. It came in an unexpected way, as almost everything
worth having does come. I could never have dreamed that I was going to
meet my opportunity nearly or quite a thousand miles away, on the banks
of the Mississippi. And yet, with that strange, delightful
consciousness of growth into a comprehension of one's self and of one's
life that most young persons must occasionally have experienced, I
often vaguely felt heavens opening for my half-fledged wings to try
themselves in. Things about me were good and enjoyable, but I could not
quite rest in them; there was more for me to be, to know, and to do. I
felt almost surer of the future than of the present.

If the dream of the millennium which brightened the somewhat sombre
close of the first ten years of my life had faded a little, out of the
very roughnesses of the intervening road light had been kindled which
made the end of the second ten years glow with enthusiastic hope. I had
early been saved from a great mistake; for it is the greatest of
mistakes to begin life with the expectation that it is going to be
easy, or with the wish to have it so. What a world it would be, if
there were no hills to climb! Our powers were given us that we might
conquer obstacles, and clear obstructions from the overgrown human
path, and grow strong by striving, led onward always by an Invisible
Guide.

Life to me, as I looked forward, was a bright blank of mystery, like
the broad Western tracts of our continent, which in the a