A Christmas Accident and Other StoriesTrumbull, Annie Eliot
General
A Christmas Accident and Other Stories
Trumbull, Annie Eliot
Christmas stories; United States -- Social life and customs -- 19th century -- Fiction
selfishness to prefer her own pleasure of possession to that of another.
But Mary listened unmoved to these arguments. Nevertheless the struggle
was not a long one. With a good grace, after a few moments of silence,
she carried the doll to her unfortunate friend. "Mamma," she said
soberly, "she shall have it, for it is right that she should. I feel it.
I shall have many things that she can never have."
For the logic of five years it was no small thing to have settled this
question in this way. It would take too much time and too much space to
dwell on the anecdotes of her childhood. Indeed, the biographer does not
linger on them long himself.
"It is meet," he says, "to speak of these early Years, not from a desire
to show that there was aught in the Childhood of Mary Twining remarkable
or unnatural, that should be the Cause of Wonder or Admiration. But the
rather that there may be evinced the Presence, even in the Germ, of
certain Qualities of Soundness of Judgment and of Thoughtfulness unusual
in a Female, which grew with her Growth, and which were in later Years,
developed into stronger Traits by no unnatural means."
In 1773 she was sent away to a school in which she remained three years,
varied by occasional visits at home. She made several friends here, and
here, for the first time, kept a methodical and somewhat extended
diary. From this diary her biographer makes copious extracts. In fact,
from this period the memoir is chiefly made up from her several
journals, in whose continuity there are now and then large gaps, with
occasional notes. I shall make less copious extracts, principally those
bearing upon that matter of which we always, more or less consciously,
seek traces in the lives of individuals, distinguished or obscure, the
love story. But first for her school life, into which few whispers of
sentiment penetrated. It was no fashionable boarding-school to which she
was sent, attended by young ladies whose dreams of what they will soon
be doing in society monopolize the hours nominally devoted to literature
and the sciences. An old friend of her mother opened her house to a few
representatives of those families with whom she was acquainted, where,
under the best teachers the country afforded, they were trained in such
acquirements as were prescribed by the canons of the day. On the
fifteenth of September she says:--
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