I know it took me a while to recover from a very youthful and amusing disinclination to rich people, which was surely never trained into me, but grew like the fruit of the horse-chestnut trees, ruggedly, of nature, and of Andover Hill; and which dropped away when its time came—just about as useless as the big brown nuts which we cut into baskets and carved into Trustees' faces for a mild November day, and then threw away.
When I came in due time to observe that property and a hardened character were not identical, and that families of ease in which one might happen to visit were not deficient in education because their incomes were large—I think it was at first with a certain sense of surprise. It is impossible to convey to one differently reared the delicious naïveté of this state of mind.
Whatever the "personal peculiarities" of our youthful conceptions of life, as acquired at Andover, one thing is sure—that we grew into love of reality as naturally as the Seminary elms shook out their long, green plumes in May, and shed their delicate, yellow leaves in October.
I can remember no time when we did not instinctively despise a sham, and honor a genuine person, thing, or claim. In mere social pretension not built upon character, intelligence, education, or gentle birth, we felt no interest. I do not remember having been taught this, in so many words. It came without teaching.
My father taught me most things without text-books or lessons. By far the most important portion of what one calls education, I owe to him; yet he never preached, or prosed, or played the pedagogue. He talked a great deal, not to us, but with us; we began to have conversation while we were still playing marbles and dolls. I remember hours of discussion with him on some subject so large that the littleness of his interlocutor must have tried him sorely. Time and eternity, theology and science, literature and art, invention and discovery came each in its turn; and, while I was still making burr baskets, or walking fences, or coasting (standing up) on what I was proud to claim as the biggest sled in town, down the longest hills, and on the fastest local record—I was fascinated with the wealth and variety which seem to have been the conditions of thought with him. I have never been more interested by anything in later life than I was in my father's conversation.
I never attended a public school of any kind—unless we except the Sunday-school that studied Acts—and when it came time for me to pass from the small to the large private schools of Andover, the same paternal comradeship continued to keep step with me. There was no college diploma for girls of my kind in my day; but we came as near to it as we could.
There was a private school in Andover, of wide reputation in its time, known to the irreverent as the "Nunnery," but bearing in professional circles the more stately name of Mrs. Edwards's School for Young Ladies. Two day-scholars, as a marked favor to their parents, were admitted with the boarders elect; and of these two I was one. If I remember correctly, Professor Park and my father were among the advisers whose opinions had weight with the selection of our course of study, and I often wonder how, with their rather feudal views of women, these two wise men of Andover managed to approve so broad a curriculum.
Possibly the quiet and modest learned lady, our principal, had ideas of her own which no one could have suspected her of obtruding against the current of her times and environment; like other strong and gentle women she may have had her "way" when nobody thought so. At all events, we were taught wisely and well, in directions to which the fashionable girls' schools of the day did not lift an eye-lash.
I was an out-of-door girl, always into every little mischief of snow or rainfall, flower, field, or woods or ice; but in spite of skates and sleds and tramps and all the west winds from Wachusett that blew through me, soul and body, I was not strong; and my father found it necessary to oversee my methods of studying. Incidentally, I think, he influenced the choice of some of our text-books, and I remember that, with the exception of Greek and trigonometry—thought, in those days, to be beyond the scope of the feminine intellect—we pursued the same curriculum that our brothers did at college. In some cases we had teachers who were then, or afterwards, college professors in their specialties; in all departments I think we were faithfully taught, and that our tastes and abilities were electively recognized.