Under such conditions and in such homes she had her growth. The tasks that engaged her hands were many, for at all times she was indefatigable in what Plato calls women’s work, τὰ ἔνδον. She rose while it was yet night; she looked well to the ways of her household, and eat not the bread of idleness. In housekeeping--which in her conservative neighborhood and among her primary values meant, almost up to this hour, not directing nor helping hired people in heaviest labors, but rather all that the phrase implied in pioneer days--her energies were spent--herself cooking; herself spinning the thread and weaving, cutting out and sewing all family garments and household linen; herself preserving flesh, fish, and fruits. To this she added the making of yeast, candles, and soap for her household, their butter and cheese--perhaps also these foods for market sale--at times their cider, and even elderberry wine for their company, of as fine a color and distinguished a flavor as the gooseberry which the wife of immortal Dr. Primrose offered her guests. Abigail Adams herself testifies that she made her own soap, in her early days at Braintree, and chopped the wood with which she kindled her fires. In such accomplishments she was one of a great sisterhood, thousands of whom served before and thousands after her. These women rarely told such activities in their letters, and rarely, too, I think, to their diaries; for their fingers fitted a quill but awkwardly after a day with distaff or butter-moulding. These duties were of the external world, mainly mechanical and routine, and they would have permitted her--an untiring materialist in all things workable by hands--to go many ways in the wanderings of thought, if grace, flexibility, and warmth had consorted with the Puritan idea of beauty. She had come to be an idealist in all things having to do with the spirit. Nevertheless, as things stood, she had but one mental path. The powers about her were theocratic. They held in their hands her life and death in all physical things, and her life and death per omnia sæcula sæculorum. They held the right to whisper approval or to publish condemnation. Her eager, active spirit was fed by sermons and exhortations to self-examination. Nothing else was offered. On Sundays and at the prayer-meetings of mid-week she was warned by these teachers, to whom everybody yielded, to whom in her childhood she had been taught to drop a wayside courtesy, that she should ever be examining head and heart to escape everlasting hell-fire, and that she should endure so as to conduct her devoted life as to appease the anger of a God as vindictive as the very ecclesiasts themselves. No escape or reaction was possible. The effect of all this upon a spirit so active, pliant, and sensitive is evident. The sole way open to her was the road to introspection--that narrow lane hedged with the trees of contemplative life to all suffering human kind.