“Don’t you think it is getting a little tiresome, this _posing_ as factory-girls of the olden time? It is very much like politicians boasting of carrying their dinners in a tin pail in their youth. What if they did?... I am proud to be a working-woman, as I always have been; but that special occupation was temporary, and not the business of our lives, we all knew, girls as we were.”... “I sent you a copy of my ‘New England Girlhood,’ for old time’s sake. Did you receive it? You could write a more entertaining one. Why don’t you write a novel? I wish you would write up _The Offering_ time, and sketch Harriot Curtis in it. She was unique.” Miss Larcom’s writings, all told, never yielded her income enough to live on, even in her modest way. In speaking of this matter in a letter written in February 1891, she says,-- “‘A New England Girlhood’ has as yet brought me only about two hundred dollars. How can writers live by writing?” She was therefore obliged to supplement her literary labors by teaching. She was very prudent in her manner of living, and never, from childhood, really had a home of her own. Towards the last of her life she found herself much cramped for means to secure that rest her tired brain so much needed; and this made the gifts received from her publisher and from her dearly loved Wheaton Seminary pupils, most welcome, and enabled her, during her last illness, to feel a relief from pecuniary anxiety. If Miss Larcom had not been exceptionally fortunate, not only in her temperament but in her surroundings,--hampered as she was all through her life by want of pecuniary means,--she could not have developed her writing talent so well. She had the rare gift of finding and keeping the right kind of friends, in her own family as well as outside, and these supplied to her life that practical (though not pecuniary) help she so much needed. So her days were free from household and other cares, and when relieved from her duties as teacher, or as editor, her time was free to use in her own chosen way. In this, her life differed from that of many women writers, who, whether married or not, often have exacting cares which interrupt and hinder the expression of their written thoughts. Miss Larcom did not have that hindrance; and she had the chance through most of her life to carry out her idea, as she expressed it, of “developing the utmost that is in me.” She had no family or domestic cares, and her children were all “dream children.” Miss Larcom might have married, once when she was quite young, and again later; but for reasons of her own she declined,--reasons, the validity of which, in one instance at least, I did not see. I have been asked if Mr. Whittier and Miss Larcom were never more than friends. I can truly answer, no. Miss Larcom was the intimate friend of Elizabeth Whittier, the poet’s sister, who, as she said, “was lovely in character, and had fine poetic taste.”