let her be friends
with a chore-boy! It was I who found him after milking-time, summer
nights, suffering, yes dying, of Least Common Multiple and Greatest
Common Divisor; I who struck the shackles from the slave and told him to
skip it all and go on to something easier, like Fractions, Percentage,
and Compound Interest, as I did myself. Oh! How he used to smell of the
cows when I was correcting his sums on warm evenings, but I don't regret
it, for he is now the joy of Limerick and the pride of Riverboro, and I
suppose has forgotten the proper side on which to approach a cow if you
wish to milk her. This now unserviceable knowledge is neatly inclosed in
the outgrown shell he threw off two or three years ago. His gratitude
to me knows no bounds, but--he writes Latin letters to Emma Jane! But as
Mr. Perkins said about drowning the kittens (I now quote from myself at
thirteen), "It is the way of the world and how things have to be!"

Well, I have read the Thought Book all through, and when I want to
make Mr. Aladdin laugh, I shall show him my composition on the relative
values of punishment and reward as builders of character.

I am not at all the same Rebecca today at sixteen that I was then,
at twelve and thirteen. I hope, in getting rid of my failings, that I
haven't scrubbed and rubbed so hard that I have taken the gloss off the
poor little virtues that lay just alongside of the faults; for as I read
the foolish doggerel and the funny, funny "Remerniscences," I see on the
whole a nice, well-meaning, trusting, loving heedless little creature,
that after all I'd rather build on than outgrow altogether, because she
is Me; the Me that was made and born just a little different from all
the rest of the babies in my birthday year.

One thing is alike in the child and the girl. They both love to set
thoughts down in black and white; to see how they look, how they sound,
and how they make one feel when one reads them over.

They both love the sound of beautiful sentences and the tinkle of
rhyming words, and in fact, of the three great R's of life, they adore
Reading and Riting, as much as they abhor 'Rithmetic.

The little girl in the old book is always thinking of what she is "going
to be."

Uncle Jerry Cobb spoiled me a good deal in this direction. I remember
he said to everybody when I wrote my verses for the flag-raising: "Nary
rung on the ladder o' fame but that child'll climb if you give her
time!"--poor Uncle Jerry!