rse and parlor maid are called
off from their natural avocations, and dusts the drawing-room with
obedient resentment. She sits cutting out underclothes in the March
vacations, when all the schools are closed, and when the heavy wagons
from the distant farming region stick in the bottomless Andover mud in
front of the professor's house. The big front door is opened, and the
dismal, creaking sounds come in.

The kind and conscientious new mother, to whom I owe many other gentle
lessons more valuable than this, teaches how necessary to a lady's
education is a neat needle. The girl does not deny this elemental
fact; but her eyes wander away to the cold sky above the Andover
mud, with passionate entreaty. To this day I cannot hear the thick
chu-chunk! of heavy wheels on March mud without a sudden mechanical
echo of that wild, young outcry: "Must I cut out underclothes forever?
Must I go on tucking the broken end of the thread into the nick in the
spool? Is _this_ LIFE?"

I am more than conscious that I could not have been an easy girl to
"bring up," and am sure that for whatever little difficulties beset
the earlier time of my ventures as a writer, no person was in any
fault. They were doubtless good for me, in their way. We all know that
some of the greatest of brain-workers have selected the poorest and
barest of spots in which to study. Luxury and bric-a-brac come to easy
natures or in easy years. The energy that very early learns to conquer
difficulty is always worth its price.

I used, later, to hear in Boston the story of the gentleman who once
took a friend to see the room of his son at Harvard College. The
friend was a man of plain life, but of rich mental achievement. He
glanced at the Persian rugs and costly draperies of the boy's quarters
in silence.

"Well," cried the fond father, "don't you think my son has a pretty
room?"

"Sir," said the visitor, with gentle candor, "_you'll never raise a
scholar on that carpet._"

Out of my discomforts, which were small enough, grew one thing for
which I have all my life been grateful--the formation of fixed habits
of work.

I have seldom waited for inspiration before setting about a task to
be done. Life is too short for that. Broken health has too often
interrupted a regimen of study which ought to have been more
continuous; but, so far as I may venture to offer an opinion from
personal experience, I should say that the writers who would be wise
to play hide and