Juliet, my oldest sister, scolded me for wearing without her consent her shell side-comb, which, in climbing through a hole in the plastering of the schoolhouse, I accidentally broke. Grandmother scolded me for mounting to the top of her high chest of drawers to see what was in them; and to crown all, when, towards sunset, I came in from a romp in the barn, with my yellow hair flying all over my face, my dress burst open, my pantalet split from the top downward, and my sun-bonnet hanging down my back, my mother reproved me severely, telling me I was “a sight to behold.” This was my usual style of dress, and I didn’t think any one need interfere; so, when she wondered if there ever was another such child, and bade me look at myself in the glass, asking if “I didn’t think I was a beautiful object,” my heart came up in my throat, and with the angry response that “I couldn’t help my looks—I didn’t make myself,” I started through the door, and running down the long lane to the grape-vine, my favorite resort, I threw myself upon the ground, and burying my face in the tall grass, wept bitterly, wishing I had never been born, or, being born, that the ban of ugliness were not upon me. Mother doesn’t love me, I thought—nobody loves me; and then I wished that I could die, for I had heard that the first dead of a family, no matter how unprepossessing they had been in life, were sure to be the best beloved in the memory of the living. To die, then, that I might be loved was all I asked for, as I lay there weeping alone, and thinking in my childish grief that never before was a girl, nine summers old, so wretched as myself. And then, in my imagination, I went through with a mental rehearsal of my own obsequies, fancying that I was dead, but still possessing the faculty of knowing all that passed around me.