ment my own memory of her whom I lost while still a child.
I seem to have been something of a puzzle to my gentle mother. I quote from one letter:
“Sarah ... the strangest child I ever saw ... so affectionate, but will not be coaxed ... super-abundance of spirits ... She tries to remember all the new rules of life. [I was five years old] ... brown eyes. I hope those eyes will not hold a shadow caused by her mother misunderstanding her and crushing out in her by sternness anything sweet and beautiful. I would not want to love her so fondly as to make a foolish, conceited woman of her, but I don’t know that that is any worse than to give her life a gloomy start.”
I love this letter. It delights me that my mother, a high-bred New England lady, to whom foolishness and frivolity were anathema, should prefer even them to harshness and a broken spirit for her little daughter. However, her desire to give my life a happy start was not incompatible with good discipline. She expected obedience and got it, sometimes in very ingenious ways. On one occasion when I had been fretful—“whining” she called it,—she suggested that as I was usually a good girl and did what she wanted it must be that I was really unable to improve my voice, that my throat must be rusty and in need of oil to cure the squeak, so she proceeded to grease the inside of it with olive oil applied on the end of a stripped white feather. Do you wonder that it was years
