imes it was seldom said to little girls, as it always has
been said to boys, that they ought to have some definite plan, while
they were children, what to be and do when they were grown up. There
was usually but one path open before them, to become good wives and
housekeepers. And the ambition of most girls was to follow their
mothers' footsteps in this direction; a natural and laudable ambition.
But girls, as well as boys, must often have been conscious of their own
peculiar capabilities,--must have desired to cultivate and make use of
their individual powers. When I was growing up, they had already begun
to be encouraged to do so. We were often told that it was our duty to
develop any talent we might possess, or at least to learn how to do
some one thing which the world needed, or which would make it a
pleasanter world.

When I thought what I should best like to do, my first dream--almost a
baby's dream--about it was that it would be a fine thing to be a
schoolteacher, like Aunt Hannah. Afterward, when I heard that there
were artists, I wished I could some time be one. A slate and pencil, to
draw pictures, was my first request whenever a day's ailment kept me at
home from school; and I rather enjoyed being a little ill, for the sake
of amusing myself in that way. The wish grew up with me; but there were
no good drawing-teachers in those days, and if there had been, the cost
of instruction would have been beyond the family means. My sister
Emilie, however, who saw my taste and shared it herself, did her best
to assist me, furnishing me with pencil and paper and paint-box.

If I could only make a rose bloom on paper, I thought I should be
happy! or if I could at last succeed in drawing the outline of
winter-stripped boughs as I saw them against the sky, it seemed to me
that I should be willing to spend years in trying. I did try a little,
and very often. Jack Frost was my most inspiring teacher. His sketches
on the bedroom window-pane in cold mornings were my ideal studies of
Swiss scenery, crags and peaks and chalets and fir-trees,--and graceful
tracery of ferns, like those that grew in the woods where we went
huckleberrying, all blended together by his touch of enchantment. I
wondered whether human fingers ever succeeded in imitating that lovely
work.

The taste has followed me all my life through, but I could never
indulge it except as a recreation. I was not to be an artist, and I am
rather glad that I was hinder