The Dame School was an English inheritance that came with the Puritans from their home across the Atlantic--such a school as the poets Cowper and Shenstone have beautifully described in their poetry. In New England a special exercise for Saturday was added; then the little ones were required to learn and recite the answers in the Westminster Assembly’s Shorter Catechism, wherein the profoundest problems of Calvinism were thoroughly set forth. When Harriet was asked the first question: “What is the chief end of man?” and was taught to say: “The chief end of man is to glorify God and to enjoy Him forever,” she thought the answer difficult. It was long and had words of more than one syllable in it. She liked far better the Church Catechism that her grandmother down in Guilford had her study which began simply with “What is your name?” This was more within her range; it was a good easy start, and the answer could be shouted out in a voice loud and clear. Another custom of the New England Dame School was perhaps also an innovation--that of requiring the children to bring a piece of sewing from home for the boys and girls to work on at odd moments so that no precious interval of time might be lost. At recess after the lunch had been unceremoniously made away with there were long uninteresting towel seams to be ripped up on one side and sewed down on the other by the industrious little fingers of Harriet and of her robust and perhaps rebellious brother, Henry Ward. In these early New England schools, as in New England life in general, the chief note was industry. Our heroic ancestors, when they left their comfortable homes in the mother country and came to this untraveled land, did not include in their plan a smooth and easy life. Since Harriet belonged to a supremely self-sacrificing family, she came to share this severe understanding of life, and her patriotic heart warmly responded to it. Perhaps when she was a little girl she did not realize that her school provided few means of healthful enjoyment for the children. But then, on the rare occasion when one of the children had a treat of nuts and raisins, or a little cake trimmed with caraway sugar plums to share with the others, her joy was all the greater because of the rarity of the festival; and if besides there were added some of those wonderful candies brought from Boston, heart-shaped and hard as pebbles, but inscribed with romantic mottoes, why, that was bliss indeed! From these rather severe foundations Harriet passed on into lessons in the reading of the Bible and in the “Columbian Orator.” She learned to write from “set copies,” and to do “sums” from Daboll’s Arithmetic.