been inclined to charge upon him the excessive study which
exaggerated her natural precocity of temperament, and the Puritan
austerity which brought her ungratified imagination into early conflict
with the circumstances and surroundings of her start in life. In a brief
preface to the memoir already published, a surviving brother of Margaret
characterizes this view of the father as inadequate and unjust.

Margaret herself called her sketch an autobiographical romance, and
evidently wrote it at a period of her life in which her personal
experience had thrown little light upon the difficulties which parents
encounter in the training of their children, and especially in that of
their eldest-born.

From the sketch itself we gather that the Fuller household, although not
corresponding to the dreams of its wonder-child, had yet in it elements
which were most precious for her right growth and development. The
family itself was descended from a stock deeply thoughtful and
religious. With the impulses of such kindred came to Margaret the strict
and thrifty order of primitive New England life, the absence of
frivolity, the distaste for all that is paltry and superficial. In after
years, her riper judgment must have shown her, as it has shown many, the
value of these somewhat stern surroundings. The little Puritan children
grew up, it is true, in the presence of a standard of character and of
conduct which must have seemed severe to them. The results of such
training have shown the world that the child so circumstanced will rise
to the height of his teaching. Started on a solid and worthy plane of
thought and of motive, he will not condescend to what is utterly mean,
base, and trivial, either in motive or in act. If, as may happen, he
fail in his first encounters with outside temptation, he will
nevertheless severely judge his own follies, and will one day set
himself to retrieve them with earnest diligence.

In the instance before us we can feel how bitter may have been the
contrast between the child's natural tastes and the realities which
surrounded her. Routine and restraint were burdensome to her when as yet
she could not know their value. Not the less were they of great
importance to her. The surroundings, too, which were devoid of artistic
luxury and adornment, forced her to have recourse to the inner sense of
beauty, which is sometimes lost and overlaid through much pleasing of
the eye and ear.

Childhood, indeed, insi