my side all through the years,--always some one whose
influence made my heart stronger and my way clearer; though sometimes
it has been only a little child that came and laid its hand into my
hand as if I were its guide, instead of its being mine.

My dear and honored Lady-Principal was surely one of my strong guiding
angels, sent to meet me as I went to meet her upon my life-road, just
at the point where I most needed her. For the one great thing she gave
her pupils,--scope, often quite left out of woman's education,--I
especially thank her. The true education is to go on forever. But how
can there be any hopeful going on without outlook? And having an
infinite outlook, how can progress ever cease? It was worth while for
me to go to those Western prairies, if only for the broader mental view
that opened upon me in my pupilage there.

During my first year at the seminary I was appointed teacher of the
Preparatory Department,--a separate school of thirty or forty
girls,--with the opportunity to go on with my studies at the same time.
It was a little hard, but I was very glad to do it, as I was unwilling
to receive an education without rendering an equivalent, and I did not
wish to incur a debt.

I believe that the postponement of these maturer studies to my early
womanhood, after I had worked and taught, was a benefit to me. I had
found out some of my special ignorances, what the things were which I
most needed to know. I had learned that the book-knowledge I so much
craved was not itself education, was not even culture, but only a help,
an adjunct to both. As I studied more earnestly, I cared for fewer
books, but those few made themselves indispensable. It still seems to
me that in the Lowell mills, and in my log-cabin schoolhouse on the
Western prairies, I received the best part of my early education.

The great advantage of a seminary course to me was that under my
broad-minded Principal I learned what education really is: the
penetrating deeper and rising higher into life, as well as making
continually wider explorations; the rounding of the whole human being
out of its nebulous elements into form, as planets and suns are
rounded, until they give out safe and steady light. This makes the
process an infinite one, not possible to be completed at any school.

Returning from the West immediately after my graduation, I was for ten
years or so a teacher of young girls in seminaries much like my own
Alma Mater. The bes