rising one morning, and after hunting
around for her shoes half an hour or so, finding them in the book-case,
where she had accidentally locked them up the night before!

To convince myself that I could write something besides rhymes, I had
attempted an essay of half a column on a very extensive subject,
"MIND." It began loftily:--

"What a noble and beautiful thing is mind!" and it went on in the same
high-flown strain to no particular end. But the editor praised it,
after having declined the verdict of the audience that she was its
author; and I felt sufficiently flattered by both judgments.

I wrote more rhymes than anything else, because they came more easily.
But I always felt that the ability to write good prose was far more
desirable, and it seems so to me still. I will give my little girl
readers a single specimen of my twelve-year-old "Diving Bell" verses,
though I feel as if I ought to apologize even for that. It is on a
common subject, "Life like a Rose":--

"Childhood's like a tender bud
That's scarce been formed an hour,
But which erelong will doubtless be
A bright and lovely flower.

"And youth is like a full-blown rose
Which has not known decay;
But which must soon, alas! too soon!
Wither and fade away.

"And age is like a withered rose,
That bends beneath the blast;
But though its beauty all is gone,
Its fragrance yet may last."

This, and other verses that I wrote then, serve to illustrate the
child's usual inclination to look forward meditatively, rather than to
think and write of the simple things that belong to children.

Our small venture set some of us imagining what larger possibilities
might be before us in the far future. We talked over the things we
should like to do when we should be women out in the active world; and
the author of the shoe-story horrified us by declaring that she meant
to be distinguished when she grew up for something, even if it was for
something bad! She did go so far in a bad way as to plagiarize a long
poem in a subsequent number of the "Diving Bell" but the editor found
her out, and we all thought that a reproof from Emilie was sufficient
punishment.

I do not know whether it was fortunate or unfortunate for me that I had
not, by nature, what is called literary ambition. I knew that I had a
knack at rhyming, and I knew that I enjoyed nothing better than to try
to put thoughts and words together, in any way. But I did it for the
p