I hasten to say that I was not at all a remarkable scholar. I cherished a taste for standing near the top of the class, somewhere, and always preferred rather to answer a question than to miss it; but this, I think, was pure pride, rather than an absorbing, intellectual passion. It was a wholesome pride, however, and served me a good turn. At one epoch of history, so far back that I cannot date it, I remember to have been a scholar at Abbott Academy long enough to learn how to spell. Perhaps one ought to give the honor of this achievement where honor is due. When I observe the manner in which the superior sex is often turned out by masculine diplomas upon the world with the life-long need of a vest-pocket dictionary or a spelling-book, I cherish a respect for the method in which I was compelled to spell the English language. It was severe, no doubt. We stood in a class of forty, and lost our places for the misfit of a syllable, a letter, a definition, or even a stumble in elocution. I remember once losing the head of the class for saying: L-u-ux--Lux. It was a terrible blow, and I think of it yet with burning mortification on my cheeks. In the "Nunnery" we were supposed to have learned how to spell. We studied what we called Mental Philosophy, to my unmitigated delight; and Butler's Analogy, which I considered a luxury; and Shakespeare, whom I distantly but never intimately adored; Latin, to which dead language we gave seven years apiece, out of our live girlhood; Picciola and Undine we dreamed over, in the grove and the orchard; English literature is associated with the summer-house and the grape arbor, with flecks of shade and glints of light, and a sense of unmistakable privilege. There was physiology, which was scarcely work, and astronomy, which I found so exhilarating that I fell ill over it. Alas, truth compels me to add that Mathematics, with a big _M_ and stretching on through the books of Euclid, darkened my young horizon with dull despair; and that chemistry--but the facts are too humiliating to relate. My father used to say that all he ever got out of the pursuit of this useful science in his college days--and he was facile valedictorian--was the impression that there was a sub-acetate of something dissolved in a powder at the bottom. All that I am able to recall of the study of "my brother's text-books," in this department, is that there was once a frightful odor in the laboratory for which Professor Hitchcock and a glass jar and a chemical were responsible, and that I said, "At least, the name of _this_ will remain with me to my dying hour." But what _was_ the name of it? "Ask me no more." In the department of history I can claim no results more calculated to reflect credit upon the little student who hated a poor recitation much, but facts and figures more. To the best of my belief, I can be said to have retained but two out of the long list of historic dates with which my quivering memory was duly and properly crowded.