could
be useful who could "keep school" as Aunt Hannah did. I did not see
anything else for a girl to do who wanted to use her brains as well as
her hands. So the plan of preparing myself to be a teacher gradually
and almost unconsciously shaped itself in my mind as the only
practicable one. I could earn my living in that way,--all-important
consideration.

I liked the thought of self-support, but I would have chosen some
artistic or beautiful work if I could. I had no especial aptitude for
teaching, and no absorbing wish to be a teacher, but it seemed to me
that I might succeed if I tried. What I did like about it was that one
must know something first. I must acquire knowledge before I could
impart it, and that was just what I wanted. I could be a student,
wherever I was and whatever else I had to be or do, and I would!

I knew I should write; I could not help doing that, for my hand seemed
instinctively to move towards pen and paper in moments of leisure. But
to write anything worth while, I must have mental cultivation; so, in
preparing myself to teach, I could also be preparing myself to write.

This was the plan that indefinitely shaped itself in my mind as I
returned to my work in the spinning-room, and which I followed out, not
without many breaks and hindrances and neglects, during the next six or
seven years,--to learn all I could, so that I should be fit to teach or
to write, as the way opened. And it turned out that fifteen or twenty
of my best years were given to teaching.

VIII.

BY THE RIVER.

IT did not take us younger ones long to get acquainted with our new
home, and to love it.

To live beside a river had been to me a child's dream of romance.
Rivers, as I pictured them, came down from the mountains, and were born
in the clouds. They were bordered by green meadows, and graceful trees
leaned over to gaze into their bright mirrors. Our shallow tidal creek
was the only river I had known, except as visioned on the pages of the
"Pilgrim's Progress," and in the Book of Revelation. And the Merrimack
was like a continuation of that dream.

I soon made myself familiar with the rocky nooks along Pawtucket Falls,
shaded with hemlocks and white birches. Strange new wild flowers grew
beside the rushing waters,--among them Sir Walter Scott's own
harebells, which I had never thought of except as blossoms of poetry;
here they were, as real to me as to his Lady of the Lake! I loved the
harebell, the fi