unnatural means."

In 1773 she was sent away to a school in which she remained three years,
varied by occasional visits at home. She made several friends here, and
here, for the first time, kept a methodical and somewhat extended
diary. From this diary her biographer makes copious extracts. In fact,
from this period the memoir is chiefly made up from her several
journals, in whose continuity there are now and then large gaps, with
occasional notes. I shall make less copious extracts, principally those
bearing upon that matter of which we always, more or less consciously,
seek traces in the lives of individuals, distinguished or obscure, the
love story. But first for her school life, into which few whispers of
sentiment penetrated. It was no fashionable boarding-school to which she
was sent, attended by young ladies whose dreams of what they will soon
be doing in society monopolize the hours nominally devoted to literature
and the sciences. An old friend of her mother opened her house to a few
representatives of those families with whom she was acquainted, where,
under the best teachers the country afforded, they were trained in such
acquirements as were prescribed by the canons of the day. On the
fifteenth of September she says:--

"I have been something more than a week at the good School which my kind
Parents have chosen for me. There seems, after all, to be little doing
here. The few exercises in Mathematics, and the selections from the
works of the most Highly Endowed of the Authors of England appear to me
to be the most Profitable. As for the matter of Embroidery, I worked
with Patience, ten years ago, a Sampler which was not considered
discreditable, and it seems to me that of the multiplying of Stitches
there is no end, and it were, perhaps, as well to go no farther. My
daily Practice on the Spinet, may, perhaps, be the means of giving
Pleasure at some Future Time, but it is the Occasion of but little
Benefit in the Present, and of the Future can we be never certain."

The question of profitableness of a good many of her employments was
often in her mind during these three years. She cannot help feeling
that there are times when it is hard to contentedly fold the hands over
even the worsted marvels of a "not discreditable" sampler. A year later,
she says again:--

"More Practice and more Embroidery this afternoon. There are those of my
Companions who ask nothing better than such unvarying Exercises. In them
t