The benefits of those three years I have been reaping ever since, I
trust not altogether selfishly. It was always my desire and my ambition
as a teacher, to help my pupils as my teachers had helped me.

The course of study at Monticello Seminary was the broadest, the most
college-like, that I have ever known; and I have had experience since
in several institutions of the kind. The study of mediaeval and modern
history, and of the history of modern philosophy, especially, opened
new vistas to me. In these our Principal was also our teacher, and her
method was to show us the tendencies of thought, to put our minds into
the great current of human affairs, leaving us to collect details as we
could, then or afterward. We came thus to feel that these were
life-long studies, as indeed they are.

The course was somewhat elective, but her advice to me was, not to omit
anything because I did not like it. I had a natural distaste for
mathematics, and my recollections of my struggles with trigonometry and
conic sections are not altogether those of a conquering heroine. But my
teacher told me that my mind had need of just that exact sort of
discipline, and I think she was right.

A habit of indiscriminate, unsystematized reading, such as I had fallen
into, is entirely foreign to the scholarly habit of mind. Attention is
the secret of real acquirement; but it was months before I could
command my own attention, even when I was interested in the subject I
was examining. It seemed as if all the pages of all the books I had
ever read were turning themselves over between me and this one page
that I wanted to understand. I found that mere reading does not by any
means make a student.

It was more to me to come into communication with my wise teacher as a
friend than even to receive the wisdom she had to impart. She was
dignified and reticent, but beneath her reserve, as is often the case,
was a sealed fountain of sympathy, which one who had the key could
easily unlock. Thinking of her nobleness of character, her piety, her
learning, her power, and her sweetness, it seems to me as if I had once
had a Christian Zenobia or Hypatia for my teacher.

We speak with awed tenderness of our unseen guardian angels, but have
we not all had our guiding angels, who came to us in visible form, and,
recognized or unknown, kept beside us on our difficult path until they
had done for us all they could? It seems to me as if one had succeeded
another by