After that Jane spent much time at the mill industriously rubbing the ground wheat between thumb and forefinger; and when the millstones were being dressed, she eagerly held out her little hands in the hope that the bits of flying flint would mark her as they had her father. These marks, she dimly felt, were an outward sign of her father's true greatness. He was a leading citizen of their Illinois community by right of character and hard-won success. Everybody admired and honored him. Did not President Lincoln even, who was, her father said, "the greatest man in the world," write to him as a comrade and brother, calling him "My dear Double D'ed Addams"?
Years afterward, when Jane Addams spoke of her childhood, she said that all her early experiences were directly connected with her father, and that two incidents stood out with the distinctness of vivid pictures.
She stood, one Sunday morning, in proud possession of a beautiful new cloak, waiting for her father's approval. He looked at her a moment quietly, and then patted her on the shoulder.
"Thy cloak is very pretty, Jane," said the Quaker father, gravely; "so much prettier, indeed, than that of the other little girls that I think thee had better wear thy old one." Then he added, as he looked into her puzzled, disappointed eyes, "We can never, perhaps, make such things as clothes quite fair and right in this hill-and-valley world, but it is wrong and stupid to let the differences crop out in things that mean so much more; in school and church, at least, people should be able to feel that they belong to one family."
Another day she had gone with her father on an errand into the poorest quarter of the town. It had always before seemed to her country eyes that the city was a dazzling place of toy- and candy-shops, smooth streets, and contented houses with sleek lawns. Now she caught a glimpse of quite another city, with ugly, dingy houses huddled close together and thin, dirty children standing miserably about without place or spirit to play.
"It is dreadful the way all the comfortable, happy people stay off to themselves," said Jane. "When I grow up, I shall, of course, have a big house, but it is not going to be set apart with all the other big homes; it is going to be right down among the poor horrid little houses like these."
Always after that, when Jane roamed over her prairie playground or sat dreaming under the Norway pines which had grown from seeds that her father had scattered in his early, pioneer days, she seemed to hear something of "the still, sad music of humanity" in the voice of the wind in the tree-tops and in the harmony of her life of varied interests. For she saw with the inward eye of the heart, and felt the throb of all life in each vital experience that was hers. It would be impossible to live apart in pleasant places, enjoying beauty which others might not share. She must live in the midst of the crowded ways, and bring to the poor, stifled little houses an ideal of healthier living. She would study medicine and go as a doctor to the forlorn, dirty children; but first there would be many things to learn.
It was her dream to go to Smith College, but her father believed that a small college near her home better fitted one for the life to which she belonged.
"My daughter is also a daughter of Illinois," he said, "and Rockford College is her proper place. Afterward she may go east and to Europe in order to gain a knowledge of what the world beyond us can give, and so get a fuller appreciation of what life at home is and may be."
Jane Addams went, therefore, to the Illinois college, "The Mt. Holyoke of the West," a college famed for its earnest, missionary spirit. The serious temper of her class was reflected in their motto which was the Anglo-Saxon word for lady—hláfdige (bread-kneader), translated as bread-giver; and the poppy was selected for the class flower, "because poppies grow among the wheat, as if Nature knew that wherever there was hunger that needed food there would be pain that needed relief."