mother's prayer that her sons, of whom there were six, should be
ministers, and ministers they all were. One incident Mrs. Stowe
remembered which may be supposed to have set Sunday apart as a day of
exceptional sanctity. It was that "of our all running and dancing out
before her from the nursery to the sitting-room one Sabbath morning
and her pleasant voice saying after us, 'Remember the Sabbath day to
keep it holy.'" Such early religious impressions made upon the mind of
a child of four would have faded in other surroundings, but it will be
seen that Harriet's environment gave no rest to her little soul.

After the death of her mother, the child was sent to her grandmother
Foote's for a long visit. There she fell to the charge of her aunt
Harriet, than whom, we are told, "a more energetic human being never
undertook the education of a child." According to her views, "little
girls were to be taught to move very gently, to speak softly and
prettily, to say 'Yes ma'am' and 'No ma'am,' never to tear their
clothes, to sew and knit at regular hours, to go to church on Sunday
and make all the responses, and to come home and be catechised. I
remember those catechisings when she used to place my little cousin
Mary and myself bolt upright at her knee while black Dinah and Harvey,
the bound boy, were ranged at a respectful distance behind us.... I
became a proficient in the Church catechism and gave my aunt great
satisfaction by the old-fashioned gravity and steadiness with which I
learned to repeat it." This early training in the catechism and the
responses bore fruit in giving Mrs. Stowe a life-long fondness for the
Episcopal service and ultimately in taking her into the Episcopal
Church, of which during her last thirty years she was a communicant.
Harriet signalized her fifth year by committing to memory twenty-seven
hymns and "two long chapters of the Bible," and even more perhaps, by
accidentally discovering in the attic a discarded volume of the
"Arabian Nights," with which, she says, her fortune was made. It was a
much more suitable child's book, one would think, than the Church
catechism or Watts's hymns.

At the age of six Harriet passed to the care of the second Mrs. Lyman
Beecher, formerly Harriet Porter, of Portland, Maine, apparently a
lady of great dignity and character. "We felt," says Mrs. Stowe, "a
little in awe of her, as if she were a strange princess rather than
our own mamma; but her voice was very sweet, h