hold Book of Poetry. Aunt Martha read us Helen’s Babies, to my delight.
I was reading at four. I have “Rewards of Merit,” small cards with gay pictures given me at the end of each week when I had been a good little girl and made proper progress in my reading lessons. And for my fifth birthday my father printed in red ink a foolscap sheet of words for me to learn to spell, five columns beginning with words of two letters and running up to six letters each. I must have been greatly pleased with my present for I remember it yet so happily. A letter written by my mother at this time says that I was insatiable in my demand for stories to be told to me and for books to be read.
My first school was a private one in First Street between Spring and Main in Los Angeles after I was seven. I remember very little about it. My career there was ended by the long sickness when father told me about his early trips to California. The next school was supposed to be very select, Miss Carle’s, over on Olive Street near Second in the same house with Miss Stem, my Adventist music teacher, who used to tell me the world was about to end, but who could give no satisfactory answer to my contention that in that case I ought to be having harp lessons instead of piano. The school numbered ten children and was conducted in Miss Carle’s bedroom, apparently, for in one corner stood a marvellous, high feather-bed; once when I carelessly stood on a chair to reach the top of the black-board, she in anger tossed me across the room to this bed, where I disappeared in
