"You are getting quite beautiful, Frank," she said, and lifted my sun-bonnet and put her hand through the curls of my hair, which was black as jet. "You will be a woman soon." She kissed me, and then as she turned away, I heard her mutter these words which struck me painfully although then I could not understand them: "A woman! with your mother's beauty for your dowry and your mother's fate for your future!" The slight wrinkle between her brows grew deeper as she said these words. "You will be a woman, and must have an education suitable to the station you will occupy," continued my mother, drawing me quietly to her, and surveying me earnestly. "Now what do _they_ teach you here?" She laughed as I gravely related the part which good old Alice--the housekeeper--took in my education. Old Alice taught me all the details of housekeeping; to sow, to knit, the fabrication of good pies, good butter, and good bread; the mystery of the preparation of various kinds of preserves; in fact, all the details of housekeeping as she understood it. And the good old dame, with her high cap, clear, bright little eyes, sharp nose, and white apron strung with a bundle of keys, always concluded her lesson with a mysterious intimation that, saving the good Mr. Walworth only, all the men in the world were monsters, more dangerous than the bears which ate up the bad children who mocked at Elijah. Laughing heartily as she heard me gravely enter into all these details, which I concluded with, "You see, mother, I'm quite a housekeeper already!" she continued: "And what does _he_ teach you, my dear?" The laughter which animated her face, was succeeded by a look of vague curiosity as I began my answer. But as I went on, her face became sad and there were tears in her eyes. My father (as I had learned to call the good clergyman) taught me to read, to write, and to cipher. He gradually disclosed to me (more by his conversation than through the medium of books) the history of past ages, the wonders of the heavens above me, the properties of the plants and flowers that grew in my path. And oftentimes by the bright wood-fire in winter, or upon the porch under the boughs, in the rich twilight of the summer scenery--while the stars twinkled through the leaves, or the Hudson glistened in the light of the rising moon--he had talked to me of GOD. Of his love for all of us, his providence watching the sparrow's fall, his mercy reaching forth its almighty arms to the lowest of earth's stricken children. Of the other world, which stretches beyond the shores of the present, not dim and cloud-shadowed, but rich in the sunlight of eternal love, and living with the realities of a state of being in which there shall be no more sickness nor pain, and tears shall be wiped from every eye, and all things be made new.