As kind as she was great, loving deeply and receiving love in return,
she has left an imperishable name. No wonder that thousands visit that
quiet grave beside Lake Geneva.

ROSA BONHEUR

[Illustration: ROSA BONHEUR.]

In a simple home in Paris could have been seen, in 1829, Raymond
Bonheur and his little family,--Rosa, seven years old, August,
Isadore, and Juliette. He was a man of fine talent in painting, but
obliged to spend his time in giving drawing-lessons to support his
children. His wife, Sophie, gave lessons on the piano, going from
house to house all day long, and sometimes sewing half the night, to
earn a little more for the necessities of life.

Hard work and poverty soon bore its usual fruit, and the tired young
mother died in 1833. The three oldest children were sent to board with
a plain woman, "La mere Catherine," in the Champs Elysees, and the
youngest was placed with relatives. For two years this good woman
cared for the children, sending them to school, though she was greatly
troubled because Rosa persisted in playing in the woods of the Bois
de Boulogne, gathering her arms full of daisies and marigolds, rather
than to be shut up in a schoolroom. "I never spent an hour of fine
weather indoors during the whole of the two years," she has often said
since those days.

Finally the father married again and brought the children home. The
two boys were placed in school, and M. Bonheur paid their way by
giving drawing lessons three times a week in the institution. If Rosa
did not love school, she must be taught something useful, and she was
accordingly placed in a sewing establishment to become a seamstress.

The child hated sewing, ran the needle into her fingers at every
stitch, cried for the fresh air and sunshine, and finally, becoming
pale and sickly, was taken back to the Bonheur home. The anxious
painter would try his child once more in school; so he arranged that
she should attend, with compensation met in the same way as for his
boys. Rosa soon became a favorite with the girls in the Fauborg
St. Antoine School, especially because she could draw such witty
caricatures of the teachers, which she pasted against the wall, with
bread chewed into the consistency of putty. The teachers were not
pleased, but so struck were they with the vigor and originality of the
drawings, that they carefully preserved the sketches in an album.

The girl was far from happy. Naturally sensitive--as what poet