She went to school both in St. Louis and Washington, in the former city principally for the sake of learning French by association with children to whom it was the mother-tongue. She spent two years at Miss English's boarding-school, in Georgetown, where she was not regarded as a diligent student. Many hours stolen from the class-rooms were not, perhaps, altogether unprofitably spent up a mulberry-tree listening to the fascinating accounts of a midshipman's life, as told by one of his cousins, and hanging hungrily upon every word, as if it in a measure foretold her own eventful career. At home her mental training was continuous, and without conscious, or at least arduous, effort on her part. Each of Benton's daughters had her place at his library table, and there, stimulated by his studious habits, she acquired readily her portion of that vast fund of knowledge which he had gleaned first from his father's library of unusual excellence and later from his contact with men and measures of his day. Of the measures there were many afoot when Benton's daughters were young, whose stupendous proportions we are scarcely able to gauge, knowing them only in the perfection of their full realization. Benton was the sympathetic friend of all progress, and beneath the steady glow of his astral lamp or the soft flicker of their mother's candles, in the nights before the advent of gas, his daughters, sewing each her fine seam, listened to the unfolding of the minds of the men who have developed America. They learned also those lessons of inexhaustible patience that must go hand in hand with every great undertaking and of the frequent subordination of the individual to the things his own mind has conceived. Thither came Morse with that sublime faith in his conception of telegraphy that made him insensible or at least indifferent to the ridicule of Congress, where a member suggested, when he at length obtained his twenty-five thousand dollars for an experimental line to Baltimore, that a second appropriation should be made for an experimental line to the moon. An overland emigrant route, the surveys for a railroad to the Pacific, and the Panama Railroad, Stevens coming to them directly from Central America and going later to the Isthmus, were some of the vast projects with whose details they were early familiarized. Later, when Jessie Benton, as Mrs. Frémont, crossed the Isthmus herself and was detained there by the fever, she saw Stevens every day, he coming, as he said, "to take his chill with her." He died in Panama, as he predicted that he would, one of the heroes in the vanguard of progress.