For almost sixteen big
foolscap pages I held them, and I was eager to go on and tell them
more about it when I reached the last line. Never again was a
subject forced upon me."
After this incident of her schooldays, what had been inclination
before was aroused to determination and the child neglected her
lessons to write. A volume of crude verse fashioned after the metre
of Meredith's "Lucile," a romantic book in rhyme, and two novels
were the fruits of this youthful ardour. Through the sickness and
death of a sister, the author missed the last three months of
school, but, she remarks, "unlike my schoolmates, I studied harder
after leaving school than ever before and in a manner that did me
real good. The most that can be said of what education I have is
that it is the very best kind in the world for me; the only
possible kind that would not ruin a person of my inclinations. The
others of my family had been to college; I always have been too
thankful for words that circumstances intervened which saved my
brain from being run through a groove in company with dozens of
others of widely different tastes and mentality. What small measure
of success I have had has come through preserving my individual
point of view, method of expression, and following in after life the
Spartan regulations of my girlhood home. Whatever I have been able to
do, has been done through the line of education my father saw fit to
give me, and through his and my mother's methods of rearing me.
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