"It will be cruelly hard on you all," said the father, soberly. "I cannot make it seem right." "Think how much good you can do afterward," urged his wife. "The time will go very quickly when we are all thinking of that. It is not hard to endure for a little for the sake of 'a gude time coming'--a better time not only for us, but for many besides. For I know you will be the true sort of doctor, James." Alice never quite knew how they did manage during those two years, but she was quite sure that work done for the sake of a good to come is all joy. "I owe much of what I am to my milkmaid days," she said. She was always sorry for children who do not grow up with the sights and sounds of the country. "One is very near to all the simple, real things of life on a farm," she used to say. "There is a dewy freshness about the early out-of-door experiences, and a warm wholesomeness about tasks that are a part of the common lot. A country child develops, too, a responsibility--a power to do and to contrive--that the city child, who sees everything come ready to hand from a near-by store, cannot possibly gain. However much some of my friends may deplore my own early struggle with poverty and hard work, I can heartily echo George Eliot's boast: "But were another childhood-world my share, I would be born a little sister there." When Alice was ten years old, the family moved from the farm to the village of Windsor, where Dr. Freeman entered upon his life as a doctor, and where Alice's real education began. From the time she was four she had, for varying periods, sat on a bench in the district school, but for the most part she had taught herself. At Windsor Academy she had the advantage of a school of more than average efficiency. "Words do not tell what this old school and place meant to me as a girl," she said years afterward. "Here we gathered abundant Greek, Latin, French, and mathematics; here we were taught truthfulness, to be upright and honorable; here we had our first loves, our first ambitions, our first dreams, and some of our first disappointments. We owe a large debt to Windsor Academy for the solid groundwork of education that it laid." More important than the excellent curriculum and wholesome associations, however, was the influence of a friendship with one of the teachers, a young Harvard graduate who was supporting himself while preparing for the ministry. He recognized the rare nature and latent powers of the girl of fourteen, and taught her the delights of friendship with Nature and with books, and the joy of a mind trained to see and appreciate. He gave her an understanding of herself, and aroused the ambition, which grew into a fixed resolve, to go to college. But more than all, he taught her the value of personal influence.