fidence and assumption, had
probably its origin in the decided way in which the little Margaret was
taught to recite her lessons. Under the controlling influence of her
father, she says that her own world sank deep within, away from the
surface of her life: "In what I did and said I learned to have reference
to other minds, but my true life was only the dearer that it was
secluded and veiled over by a thick curtain of available intellect and
that coarse but wearable stuff woven by the ages, common sense."

The Latin language opened for Margaret the door to many delights. The
Roman ideal, definite and resolute, commended itself to her childish
judgment; and even in later life she recognized Virgil as worthy to lead
the great Dante "through hell and to heaven." In Horace she enjoyed the
serene and courtly appreciation of life; in Ovid, the first glimpse of a
mythology which carried her to the Greek Olympus. Her study "soon ceased
to be a burden, and reading became a habit and a passion." Her first
real friends she found in her father's book-closet, to which, in her
leisure moments, she was allowed free access. Here, from a somewhat
miscellaneous collection, she singled out the works of Shakespeare,
Cervantes, and Moliere,--"three great authors, all, though of unequal,
yet of congenial powers; all of rich and wide, rather than aspiring
genius; all free to the extent of the horizon their eye took in; all
fresh with impulse, racy with experience; never to be lost sight of or
superseded."

Of these three Shakespeare was the first in her acquaintance, as in her
esteem. She was but eight years old when the interest of Romeo and
Juliet led her to rebel against the discipline whose force she so well
knew, and to persevere in reading before her father's very eyes a book
forbidden for the Sabbath. For this offence she was summarily dismissed
to bed, where her father, coming presently to expostulate with her,
found her in a strangely impenitent state of mind.

Margaret's books thus supplied her imagination with the food which her
outward surroundings did not afford. They did not, however, satisfy the
cravings of her childish heart. These presently centred around a human
object of intense interest,--a lady born and bred in polite European
life, who brought something of its tone and atmosphere to cheer for a
while the sombre New England horizon. Margaret seems to have first seen
her at church, where the general aspect of things was