d and she decided she would like to meet these women
and talk with them. There was no opportunity for this, however, before
she returned to Canajoharie for another year of teaching.

It proved to be a year of great sadness because of the illness of her
cousin Margaret whom she loved dearly. In addition to her teaching,
she nursed Margaret and looked after the house and children. She saw
much to discredit the belief that men were the stronger and women the
weaker sex, and impatient with Margaret's husband, she wrote her
mother that there were some drawbacks to marriage that made a woman
quite content to remain single. In explanation she added, "Joseph had
a headache the other day and Margaret remarked that she had had one
for weeks. 'Oh,' said the husband, 'mine is the real headache, genuine
pain, yours is sort of a natural consequence.'"[31]

Within a few weeks Margaret died. This was heart-breaking for Susan,
and without her cousin, Canajoharie offered little attraction.
Teaching had become irksome. The new principal was uncongenial, a
severe young man from the South whose father was a slaveholder. Susan
longed for a change, and as she read of the young men leaving for the
West, lured by gold in California, she envied them their adventure and
their opportunity to explore and conquer a whole new world.

[Illustration: Frederick Douglass]

* * * * *

The peaches were ripe when Susan returned to the farm. The orchard
which her father had planted, now bore abundantly. Restless and eager
for hard physical work, she discarded the stylish hoops which impeded
action, put on an old calico dress, and spent days in the warm
September sunshine picking peaches. Then while she preserved, canned,
and pickled them, there was little time to long for pioneering in the
West.

She enjoyed the active life on the farm for she was essentially a
doer, most happy when her hands and her mind were busy. As she helped
with the housework, wove rag carpet, or made shirts by hand for her
father and brothers, she dreamed of the future, of the work she might
do to make her life count for something. Teaching, she decided, was
definitely behind her. She would not allow her sister Mary's interest
in that career to persuade her otherwise, even if teaching were the
only promising and well-thought-of occupation for women. Reading the
poems of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, she was deeply stirred and looked
forward romantic