. In the course of time, the well-known Daniel Wadsworth,
the great man of Hartford sixty or seventy years ago, lured her away to
that city, where he personally organized a school of thirty young
ladies, the daughters of his friends, and gave her a home in his own
house. There she spent five happy years, cherished as a daughter by her
venerable patron and his wife, and held in high honor by her pupils and
their parents.

It was in 1815, while residing in Hartford, that her fame was born. Good
old Mrs. Wadsworth, having obtained sight of her journals and
manuscripts in prose and verse, the secret accumulation of many years,
inflamed her husband's curiosity so that he, too, asked to see them. The
blushing poetess consented. Mr. Wadsworth pronounced some of them worthy
of publication, and, under his auspices, a volume was printed in
Hartford, entitled "Moral Pieces in Prose and Verse." The public gave it
a generous welcome, and its success led to a career of authorship which
lasted forty-nine years, and gave to the world fifty-six volumes of
poetry, tales, travels, biography, and letters.

So passed her life till she was past twenty-eight. She had received many
offers of marriage from clergymen and others, but none of her suitors
tempted her to forsake her pupils, and she supposed herself destined to
spend her days as an old maid. But another destiny was in store for her.
On her way to and from her school, "a pair of deep-set and most
expressive black eyes" sometimes encountered hers and spoke "unutterable
things." Those eyes belonged to a widower, with three children, named
Charles Sigourney, a thriving hardware merchant, of French descent, and
those "unutterable things" were uttered at length through the unromantic
medium of a letter. The marriage occurred a few months after, in the
year 1819.

For the next fifteen years she resided in the most elegant mansion in
Hartford, surrounded by delightful grounds, after Mr. Sigourney's own
design; and even now, though the Sigourney place is eclipsed in splendor
and costliness by many of more recent date, there is no abode in the
beautiful city of Hartford more attractive than this. Mr. Sigourney was
a man of considerable learning, and exceedingly interested in the study
of languages. When he was past fifty he began the study of modern Greek.
Mrs. Sigourney became the mother of several children, all of whom, but
two, died in infancy. One son lived to enter college, but died at