"I was not fourteen when she died--I am almost fifty now. It may seem strange when I tell you that I do not believe that there has been an hour of any day since her death in which I have not thought of her and mourned for her." In 1835 Mrs. Cary died, and two years later the father married again. The stepmother, a hard-headed, practical woman, could see nothing but laziness in the desire of Alice and Phoebe to read and write. During the day she insisted that they must keep busy about the house; in the evening she refused to allow them to burn candles, and thus the girls often worked with no light except what was afforded by a saucer of lard with a twist of rag stuck into it for a wick. For books they had but the Bible, a Hymn Book, a _History of the Jews, Lewis and Clark's Travels_, Pope's _Essays_, _Charlotte Temple_, a romance, and a mutilated novel, _The Black Penitents_. The last pages of this novel were missing, and Alice often declared that it was a lifelong regret to her that she never learned how the story "turned out." With these meager helps and with no incentives to work except their own desires, Alice and Phoebe constantly wrote poems and stories. At the age of fourteen, Phoebe, without telling her father or even her sister, sent a poem to a Boston publisher. She heard nothing from it, but some time later came upon it, copied in a Cincinnati paper from the Boston journal. She laughed and cried in her excitement, but still she told no one. About this time the father and stepmother removed to another house which had been built on the farm, and left the children in possession of the old one, so that their life was decidedly happier and their chances for work were multiplied. Alice from this time on published numerous poems, chiefly in church papers, and her writings began to attract attention throughout the country. There was a freshness and charm about her little poems which won for them the favorable opinion of some of the best judges of poetry in the country. Of her "Pictures of Memory," Poe said that it was one of the most rhythmically perfect lyrics in the English language. Whittier wrote to the sisters, and Horace Greeley visited them in 1849, and thus slowly they gained the recognition and the encouragement which led them in 1850 to a rather daring step.