“The one or two things I understood at all I learned so quickly that it drove me almost crazy waiting for the fifty or more classmates to catch up—and the great many things I didn’t understand I was too frightened to learn in such a crowd. I can’t look upon little, playful, day-dreaming, high-strung children shut up in an ironbound schoolroom without experiencing a very large lump in my throat.”
At the Harvard grammar school in Cambridge her teachers first discovered the Abbott talent in her surprising fondness for English composition, a subject not customarily dear to the hearts of schoolchildren, and in her rapturous delight in reading aloud Washington Irving’s Sketch Book.
“Certainly,” says Miss Abbott, “I never showed any other special signs of intelligence, being always, I remember, at the extreme foot of my class in every subject except English. Surely nothing but my father’s unfailing sympathy and understanding sustained either me or my teachers, through the dreadful period of fractions and other mathematical horrors. And it was here at this school that I formed the first intellectual friendship of my life with a little, fair-haired, blue-eyed, earnest-minded boy who is now Professor Thomas Whittemore, of Tufts College. While the other children giggled over ink-dipped pigtails, wrote facetious notes about their teachers, and traded postage stamps, we two were whispering about authors and exchanging autographs and timidly confiding literary ambitions to each other. Funny little people we must have been—astonishingly solemn, inordinately dignified and most deliciously important With all the grave, childish self-consciousness of having already fixed our minds on higher things.
“I recall one day when we were swapping a Longfellow check-stub for a Whittier post-card, or something of that sort. We got caught at it and were kept ignominiously after school, to the infinite delight of our more frivolous-minded companions.”
Miss Abbott’s husband, Dr. Fordyce Coburn, is the “silent partner” in her work to whom Molly Make-Believe is dedicated. He aids and abets her in her stories, in taking a course in playwriting at Harvard under Professor George Baker, in anything she wants to do. Dr. Coburn is medical adviser of the Lowell high school and an all-round athlete and sportsman whenever a city practice will release him sufficiently. He and Mrs. Coburn spend their spare time salmon fishing in Maine, playing tennis at Lowell, coon and wild turkey hunting on the edge of the Florida everglades—doing anything, in fact, that two persons, husband and wife, great comrades and possessing similar tastes, can always find to do happily together.
Books by Eleanor Hallowell Abbott
Molly Make-Believe, 1910.
The Sick-a-Bed Lady, 1911.
The White-Linen Nurse, 1913.
The Indiscreet Letter, 1915.
Little Eve Edgarton, 1915.
The Stingy Receiver, 1917.
Published by the Century Company, New York.
The Ne’er-Do-Much, 1918.
Published by Dodd, Mead & Company, New York.
Old-Dad, 1919.
Published by E. P. Dutton & Company. New York.
CHAPTER XXX
HARRIET T. COMSTOCK
THE significant thing about Harriet T. Comstock has been her rôle in reprint.
After a novel has met the demand for it in the regular edition the plates from which it is printed are turned over to Grosset & Dunlap or some other publishing house which issues popular books in inexpensive form. The show has left Broadway to go on “the road.” And, you might not think it, but sometimes the worth of a show is never known until it hits “the road.”