unshine, my heart seemed to lie bare beneath the
piercing eye of the All-Seeing. I may say with gratitude that only some
superficial rubbish of acquired opinion was scorched away by this
searching light and heat. The faith of my childhood, in its simplest
elements, took firmer root as it found broader room to grow in.

I had many peculiar experiences in my log-cabin school-teaching, which
was seldom more than three months in one place. Only once I found
myself among New England people, and there I remained a year or more,
fairly reveling in a return to the familiar, thrifty ways that seem to
me to shape a more comfortable style of living than any under the sun.
"Vine Lodge" (so we named the cottage for its embowering
honey-suckles), and its warm-hearted inmates, with my little white
schoolhouse under the oaks, make one of the brightest of my Western
memories.

Only a mile or two away from this pretty retreat there was an edifice
towards which I often looked with longing. It was a seminary for young
women, probably at that time one of the best in the country, certainly
second to none in the West. It had originated about a dozen years
before, in a plan for Western collegiate education, organized by Yale
College graduates. It was thought that women as well as men ought to
share in the benefits of such a plan, and the result was Monticello
Seminary. The good man whose wealth had made the institution a
possibility lived in the neighborhood. Its trustees were of the best
type of pioneer manhood, and its pupils came from all parts of the
South and West.

Its Principal--I wonder now that I could have lived so near her for a
year without becoming acquainted with her,--but her high local
reputation as an intellectual woman inspired me with awe, and I was
foolishly diffident. One day, however, upon the persuasion of my
friends at Vine Lodge, who knew my wishes for a higher education, I
went with them to call upon her. We talked about the matter which had
been in my thoughts so long, and she gave me not only a cordial but an
urgent invitation to come and enroll myself as a student. There were
arrangements for those who could not incur the current expenses, to
meet them by doing part of the domestic work, and of these I gladly
availed myself. The stately limestone edifice, standing in the midst of
an original growth of forest-trees, two or three miles from the
Mississippi River, became my home--my student-home--for three years.