BOOKS FOR THE MILLION! HELP FOR THOSE WHO WILL HELP THEMSELVES.
It has been understood that Miss Mildred Brewster, the Boston heiress and philanthropist who has recently been making such a sensation in New York society, was quite inaccessible to reporters. But yesterday a member of the “Tribune” staff was so fortunate as to gain a gracious reception, and to learn certain facts which will be of great interest to the public in general.
Miss Brewster was found in her pretty parlor at the Fifth Avenue Hotel, dressed to attend a reception, in an exquisite robe of golden-brown velvet, simply made, and worn with a unique girdle and collar of
RARELY BEAUTIFUL CAMEOS.
Miss Brewster said that she was waiting for her carriage, but was not in haste, and would be pleased to make an authentic statement in regard to certain facts of which there had been vague rumors in the papers of late.
She began by saying that she supposed the newspapers would learn it indirectly sooner or later, and therefore she might as well give the facts so that they should be stated accurately. What followed will be given as nearly as possible in Miss Brewster’s own words.
“When I was a child,” she said, “I spent several years in some of the frontier towns of our Western states, where my father was vainly seeking for a climate which would prolong his life. I had an opportunity there to observe many things which I have never forgotten. I understood them but dimly then, but as I grew to womanhood in my New England home, surrounded with the privileges and traditions of an older and more distinctly American civilization, I often contrasted my life with what it would have been had I grown up among the German farmers, rough cowboys, greedy land speculators, and half-starved home missionaries, who formed the chief part of the people whom we met in the little towns along the railroad on the Western prairies.
“I was too young to appreciate the value of the indomitable energy of this pioneer work. I saw only the sordid, unpicturesque side of it then.
“I hated the tornadoes and blizzards; I loathed the sloughs and muddy streams—the everlasting dullness of the prairie and the prosaic struggle for existence in the little clusters of board shanties or in the isolated log cabins and dug-outs. I longed for the hills and granite bowlders, for the great elms and sparkling streams of New England, and for the refinements and conveniences of my Eastern home.
“How well I recall the tired, overworked women, toiling over their cooking-stoves, with no household conveniences, milking, churning, mending, washing, feeding the pigs, selling eggs, and making themselves prematurely old that their children might have a ‘better chance.’