was almost always a sweet little girl in a pink gown and
white sunbonnet gathering flowers when I passed that way, and I often
went out of my path to do so. These relieved the monotony of the
shanty-like shops which bordered the main street. The town had sprung
up with a mushroom-rapidity, and there was no attempt at veiling the
newness of its bricks and mortar, its boards and paint.

But there were buildings that had their own individuality, and asserted
it. One of these was a mud-cabin with a thatched roof, that looked as
if it had emigrated bodily from the bogs of Ireland. It had settled
itself down into a green hollow by the roadside, and it looked as much
at home with the lilac-tinted crane's-bill and yellow buttercups as if
it had never lost sight of the shamrocks of Erin.

Now, too, my childish desire to see a real beggar was gratified.
Straggling petitioners for "cold victuals" hung around our back yard,
always of Hibernian extraction; and a slice of bread was rewarded with
a shower of benedictions that lost itself upon us in the flood of its
own incomprehensible brogue.

Some time every summer a fleet of canoes would glide noiselessly up the
river, and a company of Penobscot Indians would land at a green point
almost in sight from our windows. Pawtucket Falls had always been one
of their favorite camping-places. Their strange endeavors, to combine
civilization with savagery were a great source of amusement to us; men
and women clad alike in loose gowns, stove-pipe hats, and moccasons;
grotesque relies of aboriginal forest-life. The sight of these
uncouth-looking red men made the romance fade entirely out of the
Indian stories we had heard. Still their wigwam camp was a show we
would not willingly have missed.

The transition from childhood to girlhood, when a little girl has had
an almost unlimited freedom of out-of-door life, is practically the
toning down of a mild sort of barbarianism, and is often attended by a
painfully awkward self-consciousness. I had an innate dislike of
conventionalities. I clung to the child's inalienable privilege of
running half wild; and when I found that I really was growing up, I
felt quite rebellious.

I was as tall as a woman at thirteen, and my older sisters insisted
upon lengthening my dresses, and putting up my mop of hair with a comb.
I felt injured and almost outraged because my protestations against
this treatment were unheeded and when the transformation in my visi