as the village was, there had been
one young lady in it who had had the best musical advantages. Our
heroine had not let this opportunity slip. She had not heard many
concerts, but she had practiced the best music. She had studied Latin,
of course, in the village high school, and French with a French lady who
spent her summers in the neighborhood. She had treated herself every
year to five dollars' worth of Soule's photographs, and she had studied
these so carefully that she really knew something of the great artists.

Then she had traveled! She had begun to teach in her own village when
she was eighteen, and every summer she had spent a little of her salary
in some interesting trip. As a teacher, she had taken advantage of
excursion rates to the great National Teachers' Institutes. In this way
she had visited most sections of the United States. And she had planned
her trips so thoughtfully that she had been alive to everything which
was to be seen. Once she had even taken the accumulations of several
years and spent her summer abroad. The sisters looked scornful at this.
How could anybody see anything worth seeing with an excursion party? Yet
they had to own that what we see depends on the eyes we have as much as
on our surroundings. She could not see everything in three months, but
she knew what she wanted to see, and she had thoroughly assimilated that
by much thought about it before and after the journey.

She had once spent six weeks at a summer school of languages, and had
devoted herself so energetically to German that she had been able to go
on reading it by herself, and thus in a few years she had become
familiar with some of the masterpieces of its literature. But the
sisters were most astonished when they found her reading Italian one
day--Dante, too, which was too hard for them. The explanation of this
was that for some years the Catholic priest in her native village had
been a good-natured Tuscan who had been glad to exchange Italian for
English with her.

You see, she had had no regular education and no money but what she
earned, yet by choosing the best within reach at all times she had
become as cultivated as her sisters-in-law who had had every
opportunity.

All women are not so fond of study; but they may be cultivated,
nevertheless. The finest manners I have ever seen belong to a woman who
has lived all her life in the house where she was born in a little town
in New England. She never went away