bly. Mr. Tiffany quotes a lady
who in her girlhood, as a special reward of merit, was allowed to make
an entire shirt under the supervision of Madam Dix. It was an
experience never forgotten. No stitch in the entire garment could be
allowed to differ perceptibly from every other, but the lady spoke of
the ordeal with enthusiastic gratitude, declaring that it had been a
life-long benefit to her to have been compelled to do one piece of
work thoroughly well.

"I never knew childhood," Miss Dix said pitifully in after life.
Certainly with this exacting grandmother, there can be no childhood as
it is understood to-day; but if Dorothea submits to the rigorous
discipline enforced upon her, she will make a woman of iron fibre who
will flinch from no hardship and will leave no task undone. Happily
she did submit to it. The alternative would have been to return to her
half-vagabond father. Too much discipline or too little was her
destiny. She preferred to take the medicine in excess, and in the end
was grateful for it.

Dorothea was so apt a pupil and so ambitious that, at the age of
fourteen, she returned to Worcester and opened a school for small
children, prudently lengthening the skirts and sleeves of her dress to
give dignity and impressiveness to her appearance. Half a century
later one of these pupils vividly recalled the child-teacher, tall of
her age, easily blushing, at once beautiful and imposing in manner,
but inexorably strict in discipline.

Dorothea spent the next four years in Boston in preparation for a more
ambitious undertaking and, in 1821 at the age of nineteen, she opened
a day school in Boston in a small house belonging to Madam Dix. The
school prospered and gradually expanded into a day and boarding
school, for which the Dix mansion, whither the school was removed,
furnished convenient space. Madam Dix, enfeebled by age and
infirmities, laid down the scepter she had wielded, and the premises
passed virtually into the hands of Dorothea. Thither came pupils from
"the most prominent families in Boston" and other Massachusetts towns,
and even from beyond the limits of the State. There also she brought
her brothers to be educated under her care and started upon a business
career.

Hardly had she started her school for the rich and fortunate before,
anticipating her vocation as a philanthropist, she opened another for
the poor and destitute. A letter is preserved in which she pleadingly
asks the conscien