On Thursdays I was excused from exercise to take a bath. The rule of the clock was rigid, and when it said four o’clock on Thursday I must be ready to enter and bathe, or go forever unbathed. What a smashing of precedent! But I suppose one tub could not accommodate over forty girls on Saturday night, the correct American bath night.
The actual school work was a delight, with glimpses into new fields: chemistry, where we saw samples of aluminum, a metal which might some day become very useful; geology, with a long trip on the street car miles and miles into the country to the State University at Berkeley, where Professor Le Conte told us most interesting things—geology, gently tuned by Professor Thomas Heaton to meet the exigencies of Mosaic “days of creation,” and yet opening the mind to questionings. There was also Cicero and an introduction into the German language and English literature. I even read the whole of Paradise Lost. Then, bad eyes, and a verdict of never any more school, not even sight enough for sewing! But oculists don’t know everything always.
And so I came home. In the house were many books,—always had been so long as I could remember. The rigid Maine rule of semi-annual house-cleaning held sway, and it was often my task to take out, beat, dust and replace all the volumes in the capacious bookcases. There were essays, histories, biographies: sets of Dickens, Thackeray, George Eliot, Hawthorne, Scott, besides scattered novels; Shakespeare was there and a few other dramatists, all the standard poets, Cervantes and Plutarch. These were not only dusted, but read to a great or less extent.
Harper’s Magazine, with its buff cover adorned with cupids, cornucopias, fruits and flowers, was a regular visitor, as was the Century later. I recall the laughter of a family reading of Frank Stockton’s The Casting Away of Mrs. Lecks and Mrs. Aleshine. The Congregationalist and The Pacific provided Sunday reading for father, along with his Bagster’s Bible. He once pointed out to me mildly that the varying accounts of the Hebrew historical events did not “jibe.” Several missionary magazines gave knowledge of life in far parts of the world. Littell’s Living Age came for several years, and, being bound, was at least handled semi-annually.
The tri-weekly New York Tribune and Harper’s Weekly (until it turned mug-wump) brought news out of the East to supplement what two daily papers afforded. I think father knew where every raw material in the world was produced and where it was manufactured. He used to “poke fun” at me as an educated woman, after I returned from college, because I could not name, characterize and assign to his state every United States Senator.
I had the advantage of a home where good English was spoken, where one was expected to know how to spell correctly and write grammatically, where an interest was taken in large and wide questions, and where everyone found his chief pleasure and amusement in reading. Rather a bad environment in which to find oneself condemned to useless eyes!
Los Angeles did not in those days offer, naturally, the same opportunities in art, theater, and music that the East did, but I saw Booth and Barrett in Julius Caesar and I heard Adelina Patti.
When my aunt came to our home she brought with her about a hundred photographic copies of the world’s famous paintings and pictures of cathedrals and statuary. On many a Sunday afternoon I pored over these until the names of Ralphael, da Vinci, Murillo, Phidias became as familiar as Longfellow or Scott.
As was customary, a faithful attempt extending over many years, was made to make a musician out of me. It failed. I was eye-minded. That exposure to art on my natal day had determined my tastes.
Vacations, the most welcome part of the school year, were spent, with the exception of one summer in the East, for the most part at the Cerritos. As the resort grew at Long Beach and we young folks attained age we passed many hours on the sand and in the breakers. Then, when I was eighteen, I had my first experience of camp life at Avalon, just established at Catalina. I learned to swim and dive, to tramp and sleep on the ground. For three summers we did this while the island was yet primitive and uncrowded.