see their fingers come
through or not." I had heard it said that it takes nine tailors to
make a man and now I reflected that it would take eighteen tailors to
make a thimble. Upon presenting this mathematical problem to Mrs.
Preston she told me about the origin of the old saying:

"It was not that kind of tailor at first. In old England the custom
was to announce a death by tolling a bell. After the bell had ceased
tolling, a number of strokes, called 'tailers,' indicated whether the
death was of a child, a woman or a man; three for a child, nine for a
man. People counting would say, 'Nine tailers, that's a man,' which in
time became colloquially 'Nine tailers make a man.' When the custom
became obsolete the saying remained, its application was forgotten,
_o_ was substituted for _e_ and it was used in derogation of a most
worthy and necessary member of the body politic."

Margaret Preston was very small, in explanation of which fact she told
me there was a story that she had been tossed on the horns of a cow.
There was Scotch blood in the Junkin family and with it had descended
the superstition that this experience dwarfs a child's growth. When
she sat upon an ordinary chair her little feet did not touch the
floor. She had a way of smoothing the front of her dress with her
hands as she talked.

Knowing her as she was then and remembering her devotion to the South
and the sacrifices she had made for her home through the dark years,
one might have thought that she was a native daughter of Virginia. In
the village of Milton, Pennsylvania, where her father, Reverend George
Junkin, was pastor of the Associate Reformed Church, Margaret Junkin
was born on the 19th of May, 1820, in a small, plain, rented house, a
centre of love and harmony, with simple surroundings, for the family
finances did not purchase household luxuries, but were largely
expended in assisting those less fortunately placed.

In this little home, where rigid economy was practised and high
aspirations reigned, our future poet entered upon the severe
intellectual training which caused her at twenty-one, when the door of
scholastic learning was closed upon her by the partial failure of her
sight, to be called a scholar, though she sorrowfully resented the
title, asking, "How can you speak of one as a scholar whose studies
were cut short at twenty-one?"

She received her first instruction from her mother, passing then under
the tutorship of her father, w