It is also a matter beyond dispute that a mother with such tastes and accomplishments as Mrs. Beecher possessed would see to it that the education of her daughters on the artistic side should not be neglected. And in fact there was need--at any rate we should think so to-day. In the Litchfield Female Academy there was indeed some instruction in art. Painting, embroidery and the piano were at that time considered the essential things in the proper education of a young lady. The description that _Aurora Leigh_ gives of the instruction she received at the hands of her English aunts in the first book of Mrs. Browning’s great poem, “Aurora Leigh,” belongs to about the same period and will be considered sufficiently laughable by the girls of to-day. Ideas in New England were not very different from these. In the Academy in Litchfield they painted flowers that were delicate and stiff; they worked samplers and coats of arms in chenille and floss; pastoral pieces were in great favor, representing fair young shepherdesses sitting with crooks in their hands on green chenille banks, tending animals of uncertain description which were to be received by faith as sheep. There were mourning pieces with a willow tree by a family monument and weeping mourners with faces artfully concealed by flowing pocket-handkerchiefs. The sweet confiding innocence, said Mrs. Stowe with gentle irony in “Oldtown Folks,” which regarded the making of objects like these as more suited to the tender female character than the pursuit of Latin and mathematics was characteristic of the ancient régime. Did not Penelope embroider, and all sorts of princesses, ancient and modern? And was not embroidery a true feminine grace?[3] We may well doubt if Harriet took much interest in these beasts of floss and chenille and probably preferred, as we should think she would, her childhood landscapes of gray and brown mosses. But when she was older and could follow her home instruction in painting she gained a skill that made sketching landscapes and other work in water color a resource to her all her life.