I.
GENIUS IN PANTALETTES.
Saral Payson Willis, the subject of this sketch, was born in Portland, Maine, July 9th, 1811. Through the negligence, doubtless, of the clerk of the town, it is not recorded that the sun stood still on the eventful morning, but old housewives tell a legend of the cocks' crowing with extraordinary shrillness in honor of this wonderful advent. She is the daughter of Mr. Nathaniel Willis, one of the most industrious and respectable citizens of Boston, now a man well advanced in years. It is scarcely necessary to add that she is sister to Mr. N. P. Willis, the brilliant essayist and poet.
Mr. Willis, senior, "commenced life" as a mechanic, and at the time of his marriage worked at the case as a journeyman printer. He afterwards published the Eastern Argus, in Portland. Meeting with reverses in that city, he removed to Boston, where he established, and for many years edited, the "Recorder," the oldest religious paper in New-England.
Mr. Willis has met with a similar experience to that of most men in his calling. He never made a fortune at publishing. At the present time, although aged and infirm, he finds it necessary to devote his failing energies to the publication of the "Youth's Companion." Yet, notwithstanding his narrow means, Mr. Willis contrived—at how great a sacrifice only parents can guess, to give his sons and daughters that education which is a poor man's noblest legacy.
II.
FANNY AT SCHOOL.
In accordance with the course he had wisely planned for his children, Sarah Willis—the veritable "Fanny"—was favored with an early introduction into the seminary of Miss Catherine E. Beecher, in Hartford, Conn. At this well-conducted establishment—the most popular in the country, at that time—Miss Fanny received her first strong impressions of life and the world. We have never heard her spoken of as a very apt or studious pupil. Staid works of philosophy and learning were not much to her taste. But from the prohibited pages of romances and poems, eagerly devoured in secret, her craving genius derived an active stimulus. Already she had become a keen dissector of the human heart, and she found plenty of pleasant practice for the scalpel of her wit among the young ladies of the school. Here, too, the novel and startling experiences of boarding-school flirtation gave their warm coloring to her future life. Fanny possessed a large capacity for this description of knowledge, and her writings show a better memory for those more pleasant branches of female education, than for the dry rules of syntax and prosody. In fact, the best of her sketches are transcripts of her school-girl life—for Fanny writes well only when giving the concentrated vinegar and spice of her own vivid experiences.
A sketch of Fanny's, entitled "A Leaf from my Experience," referring to her school-life, may, perhaps, form the best embodiment of the earlier portion of her school-history.
"Miss Jemima Keturah Rix was at the head of a flourishing school for very young ladies and gentlemen. She originated in the blue state of Connecticut, where the hens, from principle, refrain from laying eggs on Sunday, and the yeast stops working for the same reason. She had very little opinion of her own sex, and none at all of the other. Her means were uncommonly limited, yet 'she was too much of a gentlewoman to keep school, had it not been for her strong desire to reform the rising generation.'
"In person, she was tall and spare, with small, snapping black eyes, and thin, compressed lips, telling strongly of her vixenish propensities. She could repeat the Ten Commandments and Assembly's Catechism backwards, without missing a word; and was a firm believer in total depravity and the eternal destruction of little dead babies.
"She had the usual variety of temper and disposition, generally found in a school, and a way of her own of getting along with them. She would catch a refractory pupil with one hand by the shoulder, and press the thumb with such force into the hollow of the arm, that the poor victim was ready to subscribe to any articles of faith or practice she might see fit to draw up; and who of us will soon forget that old brass thimble, mounted on her skinny forefinger, as it came snapping against our foreheads?