reer" were the last things in
earth or heaven then occupying her mind.

[Illustration: ABBOT ACADEMY, ANDOVER, MASSACHUSETTS.

From a photograph by Geo. H. Leek, Lawrence, Massachusetts, taken in
1864.]

Afterwards, I wrote with a distinct purpose, and, I think, quite
steadily. I know that longer stories went, soon and often, to the old
magazine, which never sent them back; and to which I am glad to pay
the tribute of a gratitude that I have never outgrown. There was
nothing of the stuff that heroines and geniuses are made of in a shy
and self-distrustful girl who had no faith in her own capabilities,
and, indeed, at that time, the smallest possible amount of interest in
the subject.

It may be a humiliating fact, but it is the truth, that had my first
story been refused, or even the second or the third, I should have
written no more.

For the opinion of important editors, and for the sacredness of market
value in literary wares, as well as in professorships or cotton cloth,
I had a kind of respect at which I sometimes wonder; for I do not
recall that it was ever distinctly taught me. But, assuredly, if
nobody had cared for my stories enough to print them, I should have
been the last person to differ from the ruling opinion, and should
have bought at Warren Draper's old Andover book-store no more cheap
printer's paper on which to inscribe the girlish handwriting (with the
pointed letters and the big capitals) which my father, with patient
pains, had caused to be taught me by a queer old travelling-master
with an idea. Professor Phelps, by the way, had an exquisite
chirography, which none of his children, to his evident
disappointment, inherited.

[Illustration: "THE STONE BUILDING," PHILLIPS ACADEMY, ANDOVER,
MASSACHUSETTS.

This building was burned in 1864 or 1865.]

But the editor of "Harper's" took everything I sent him; so the
pointed letters and the large capitals continued to flow towards his
desk.

Long after I had achieved whatever success has been given me, this
magazine returned me one of my stories--it was the only one in a
lifetime. I think the Editor then in power called it too tragic,
or too something; it came out forthwith in the columns of another
magazine that did not agree with him, and was afterwards issued, I
think, in some sort of "classic" series of little books.

I was a little sorry, I know, at the time, for I had the most
superstitious attachment for the magazine that, when "I was