There was one anecdote her uncle liked to tell of her, as an evidence of her independent spirit and her kind heart. When she was about eleven years old, she was well grown and, indeed, mature looking for her age. Unlike most young ladies at that ambitious period of life, she was entirely unconscious of her budding charms, never dreaming that men must pause to wonder at and admire her, and that her actions were no longer unimportant as those of a child. One day Mr. Buchanan was shocked upon beholding from his window Miss Harriet, with flushed cheek and hat awry trundling along, in great haste, a wheelbarrow full of wood. Upon his rushing out to inquire into the cause of such an unseemly and undignified proceeding, she answered in some confusion, that she was just on her way to old black Aunt Tabitha, with a load of wood, because it was so cold. In administering the reproof that followed, Mr. Buchanan took good care that she should not see the amused and gratified smile with which he turned away from the generous culprit. About this time, her uncle executed a threat which he had long held suspended over Harriet. This was to place her under the tender care of a couple of elderly maidens of the place—ladies famous for their strict sense of propriety and their mean domestic economy—just such rule as our high-spirited young lady would chafe under. She had never believed her uncle to be in earnest about the matter, and her horror at finding herself duly installed in this pious household, under the surveillance of these old damsels, must have been comical enough to Mr. Buchanan, who was never blind to the funny side of anything. He was in the Senate at the time, and she was in the habit of pouring out her soul to him in childish letters that complained of early hours, brown sugar in tea, restrictions in dress, stiff necks, and cold hearts. The winter passed slowly away, only solaced by the regular arrival of fatherly letters from her uncle, or by an occasional frolic out of doors—to say nothing of pocketsful of crackers and rock-candy, with which the appetite of the young woman was appeased, her simple fare being, if not scanty, unsuited to the tastes of one who had sat at Mr. Buchanan’s table. The next autumn, when she was twelve years old, she was sent with her sister, a lovely girl but a few years Harriet’s senior, to a school in Charlestown, Va. Here they remained three years. Harriet was not a student, but she knew her lessons because it was no trouble for her to learn them. She was excessively fond of music, and made great progress in it. Her vacations were spent with Mr. Buchanan; but the great event of those three years was a visit with him to Bedford Springs. It was a glorious time, which even now the woman of the world looks back upon with her own bright smile of pleasure.