Lucy Read Anthony was of a very timid and reticent disposition and painfully modest and shrinking. Before the birth of every child she was overwhelmed with embarrassment and humiliation, secluded herself from the outside world and would not speak of the expected little one even to her mother. That mother would assist her overburdened daughter by making the necessary garments, take them to her home and lay them carefully away in a drawer, but no word of acknowledgment ever passed between them. This was characteristic of those olden times, when there were seldom any confidences between mothers and daughters in regard to the deepest and most sacred concerns of life, which were looked upon as subjects to be rigidly tabooed. Susan came into the world in a cold, dreary season. The event was looked forward to with dread by the mother, but when the little one arrived she received a warm and loving welcome. She was born into a staid and quiet but very comfortable home, where great respect and affection existed between father and mother. William Cullen Bryant, whose birth-place was but twenty miles distant, wrote of this immediate locality: I stand upon my native hills again, Broad, round and green, that in the summer sky, With garniture of waving grass and grain, Orchards and beechen forests, basking lie; While deep the sunless glens are scooped between, Where brawl o'er shallow beds the streams unseen. Each night in early childhood she watched the sun set behind the great dome of "Old Greylock," that noble mountain-peak so famed in the literature of Berkshire, from whose lofty summit one looks across four States. "It lifts its head like a glorified martyr," said Beecher, and Julia Taft Bayne wrote: Come here where Greylock rolls Itself toward heaven; in these deep silences, World-worn and fretted souls, Bathe and be clean. To the child's idea its top was very close against the sky, and its memory and inspiration remained with her through life. Susan was very intelligent and precocious. At the age of three she was sent to the grandmother's to remain during the advent of the fourth baby at home, and while there was taught to spell and read. Her memory was phenomenal, and she had an insatiable ambition, especially for learning the things considered beyond a girl's capacity. The mother was most charitable, always finding time amidst her own family cares to go among the sick and poor of the neighborhood. One of Susan's childish grievances, which she always remembered, was that the "Sunday-go-to-meeting" dresses of the three little Anthony girls were lent to the children of a poor family to wear at the funeral of their mother, while she and her sisters had to wear their old ones. She thought these were good enough to lend. She had no toys or dolls except of home manufacture, but her rag baby and set of broken dishes afforded just as much happiness as children nowadays get from a roomful of imported playthings.