I have no doubt I exaggerated my ugliness somewhat for, in addition to youth and health, I had a clear dark skin, good teeth, unusually fine and abundant hair, and a well-formed body. The one thing I took pride in was my hair. It was a pardonable pleasure that I felt in contrasting my long heavy brown braids with the wisps of hair many of the girls had. But when I was perhaps sixteen, working too hard in school and with my music, my hair came out so rapidly that one day a girl sitting behind me leaned over and whispered, “Why, what has become of your hair?” Bitter were the tears I shed that night! “_That_ is going, too!” I cried in my wretchedness. But it did not all go; I still had more than the average girl. Even to-day I sometimes get a sudden sense of that schoolgirl’s pang at the threatened loss of her one beauty. In babyhood I received a burn the shock of which nearly cut short my life: Tied in a high chair and placed before a stove, I was pushed over by some frozen clothes which a “green” Irish girl had brought in from the yard. The under part of my chin rested upon the stove, leaving its imprint, when I was snatched from it. As I grew up I grieved over the scar thus sustained. I became morbidly sensitive over it, though consoling myself somewhat that it was not in a more conspicuous place. I envied children and girls their smooth soft chins. It seemed to me the sweetest part of a girl’s features--that white, smooth place under the chin. When a child I would never play “Do you love butter?” although I liked to see the buttercup’s yellow shadow on the chins of the other girls. When my turn came I always drew away, painfully embarrassed. As a young girl I used to think it would be lovely to faint away. When we “made believe,” I usually chose to be French, to have black eyes and red cheeks, and to faint away on critical occasions. But after studying physiology and hygiene, and acquiring more sensible views, I scorned these earlier ambitions, and ridiculed the silly girls who pretended to swoon when vaccinated; and who turned pale and asked to leave the room when the skeleton was brought in to the physiology recitations.