me very easy and happy--signifying
chiefly, that one meant to be a good girl, if possible. What if one
did conduct a voluminous religious correspondence with the other
Professor's daughter, who put notes under the fence which divided our
homes? We were none the worse girls for that. And we outgrew it, when
the time came.

[Illustration: PROFESSOR M. STUART PHELPS, ELDEST SON OF PROFESSOR
AUSTIN PHELPS, AND BROTHER OF ELIZABETH STUART PHELPS.

Professor M. Stuart Phelps died in 1883, at the age of 34. He was
professor of philosophy in Smith College, was called by those entitled
to judge, the most promising young psychologist in this country, and a
brilliant future was prophesied for him. The above portrait is from a
photograph by Pach Brothers, New York.]

One thing, supremely, I may say that I learned from the Andover life,
or, at least, from the Andover home. That was an everlasting scorn of
worldliness--I do not mean in the religious sense of the word. That
tendency to seek the lower motive, to do the secondary thing, to
confuse sounds or appearances with values, which is covered by the
word as we commonly use it, very early came to seem to me a way of
looking at life for which I know no other term than underbred.

There is no better training for a young person than to live in the
atmosphere of a study--we did not call it a library, in my father's
home. People of leisure who read might have libraries. People who
worked among their books had studies.

The life of a student, with its gracious peace, its beauty, its
dignity, seemed to me, as the life of social preoccupation or success
may seem to children born to that penumbra, the inevitable thing.

As one grew to think out life for one's self, one came to perceive
a width and sanctity in the choice of work--whether rhetoric or art,
theology or sculpture, hydraulics or manufacture--but to _work_, to
work hard, to see work steadily, and see it whole, was the way to be
reputable. I think I always respected a good blacksmith more than a
lady of leisure.

I know it took me a while to recover from a very youthful and amusing
disinclination to rich people, which was surely never trained into
me, but grew like the fruit of the horse-chestnut trees, ruggedly,
of nature, and of Andover Hill; and which dropped away when its time
came--just about as useless as the big brown nuts which we cut into
baskets and carved into Trustees' faces for a mild November day, and
then th