here,
and always preferred rather to answer a question than to miss it; but
this, I think, was pure pride, rather than an absorbing, intellectual
passion. It was a wholesome pride, however, and served me a good turn.

At one epoch of history, so far back that I cannot date it, I remember
to have been a scholar at Abbott Academy long enough to learn how to
spell. Perhaps one ought to give the honor of this achievement where
honor is due. When I observe the manner in which the superior sex
is often turned out by masculine diplomas upon the world with the
life-long need of a vest-pocket dictionary or a spelling-book, I
cherish a respect for the method in which I was compelled to spell
the English language. It was severe, no doubt. We stood in a class of
forty, and lost our places for the misfit of a syllable, a letter, a
definition, or even a stumble in elocution. I remember once losing the
head of the class for saying: L-u-ux--Lux. It was a terrible blow, and
I think of it yet with burning mortification on my cheeks.

In the "Nunnery" we were supposed to have learned how to spell. We
studied what we called Mental Philosophy, to my unmitigated delight;
and Butler's Analogy, which I considered a luxury; and Shakespeare,
whom I distantly but never intimately adored; Latin, to which dead
language we gave seven years apiece, out of our live girlhood;
Picciola and Undine we dreamed over, in the grove and the orchard;
English literature is associated with the summer-house and the grape
arbor, with flecks of shade and glints of light, and a sense of
unmistakable privilege. There was physiology, which was scarcely work,
and astronomy, which I found so exhilarating that I fell ill over it.
Alas, truth compels me to add that Mathematics, with a big _M_ and
stretching on through the books of Euclid, darkened my young
horizon with dull despair; and that chemistry--but the facts are too
humiliating to relate. My father used to say that all he ever got out
of the pursuit of this useful science in his college days--and he was
facile valedictorian--was the impression that there was a sub-acetate
of something dissolved in a powder at the bottom.

All that I am able to recall of the study of "my brother's
text-books," in this department, is that there was once a frightful
odor in the laboratory for which Professor Hitchcock and a glass jar
and a chemical were responsible, and that I said, "At least, the name
of _this_ will remain with me