devoted to the high ends
of a scholar's life. His department was that of rhetoric, and his
appreciation of the uses and graces of language very early descended
like a mantle upon me. I learned to read and to love reading, not
because I was made to, but because I could not help it. It was the
atmosphere I breathed."

"Day after day the watchful girl observed the life of a student--its
scholarly tastes, its high ideals, its scorn of worldliness and paltry
aims or petty indulgences, and forever its magnificent habits of
_work_."

"At sixteen, I remember, there came to me a distinct arousing or
awakening to the intellectual life. As I look back, I see it in a
flash-light. Most of the important phases or crises of our lives can
be traced to some one influence or event, and this one I connect
directly with the reading to me by my father of the writings of De
Quincey and the poems of Wordsworth. Every one who has ever heard him
preach or lecture remembers the rare quality of Professor Phelps's
voice. As a pulpit orator he was one of the few, and to hear him read
in his own study was an absorbing experience. To this day I cannot put
myself outside of certain pages of the laureate or the essayist. I do
not read; I listen. The great lines beginning:

"'Thanks to the human heart by which we live,
Thanks to its tenderness, its joys and fears;'

the great passage which opens: 'Then like a chorus the passion
deepened,' and which rises to the aching cry: 'Everlasting
farewells!... Everlasting farewells!' ring in my ears as they left his
lips."

For my first effort to sail the sea of letters, it occurs to me that I
ought to say that my father's literary reputation cannot be held
responsible.

I had reached (to take a step backwards in the story) the mature age
of thirteen. I was a little girl in low-necked gingham dresses, I
know, because I remember I had on one (of a purple shade, and
incredibly unbecoming to a half-grown, brunette girl) one evening when
my first gentleman caller came to see me.

I felt that the fact that he was my Sunday-school teacher detracted
from the importance of the occasion, but did not extinguish it.

It was perhaps half-past eight, and, obediently to law and gospel, I
had gone upstairs.

The actual troubles of life have never dulled my sense of
mortification at overhearing from my little room at the head of the
stairs, where I was struggling to get into that gingham gown and
present a tardy