"
Her mother's health, which always had been perfect, broke about
the time of the author's first remembrance due to typhoid fever
contracted after nursing three of her children through it. She
lived for several years, but with continual suffering, amounting
at times to positive torture.
So it happened, that led by impulse and aided by an escape from
the training given her sisters, instead of "sitting on a cushion
and sewing a fine seam"--the threads of the fabric had to be
counted and just so many allowed to each stitch!--this youngest
child of a numerous household spent her waking hours with the
wild. She followed her father and the boys afield, and when tired
out slept on their coats in fence corners, often awaking with shy
creatures peering into her face. She wandered where she pleased,
amusing herself with birds, flowers, insects, and plays she
invented. "By the day," writes the author, "I trotted from one
object which attracted me to another, singing a little song of
made-up phrases about everything I saw while I waded catching
fish, chasing butterflies over clover fields, or following a bird
with a hair in its beak; much of the time I carried the
inevitable baby for a woman-child, frequently improvised from an
ear of corn in the silk, wrapped in catalpa leaf blankets.
Pages:
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28