This literary success was achieved at the age of twenty-three, and the same year Miss Francis opened a private school in Watertown, which she continued three years, until her marriage gave her other occupations. In 1826, she started The Juvenile Miscellany, as already mentioned, said to be the first magazine expressly for children, in this country. In it, first appeared many of her charming stories afterward gathered up in little volumes entitled, "Flowers for Children."

In 1828, she was married to Mr. David Lee Child, then 34 years of age, eight years older than herself. Whittier describes him, as a young and able lawyer, a member of the Massachusetts legislature, and editor of the Massachusetts Journal. Mr. Child graduated at Harvard in 1817 in the class with George Bancroft, Caleb Cushing, George B. Emerson, and Samuel J. May. Between 1818 and 1824, he was in our diplomatic service abroad under Hon. Alexander Everett, at that time, Charge d'Affaires in the Netherlands. On his return to America, Mr. Child studied law in Watertown where, at the house of a mutual friend, he met Miss Lydia Maria Francis. She herself reports this interesting event under date of Dec. 2, 1824. "Mr. Child dined with us in Watertown. He possesses the rich fund of an intelligent traveller, without the slightest tinge of a traveller's vanity. Spoke of the tardy improvement of the useful arts in Spain and Italy." Nearly two months pass, when we have this record: "Jan. 26, 1825. Saw Mr. Child at Mr. Curtis's. He is the most gallant man that has lived since the sixteenth century and needs nothing but helmet, shield, and chain-armor to make him a complete knight of chivalry." Not all the meetings are recorded, for, some weeks later, "March 3," we have this entry, "One among the many delightful evenings spent with Mr. Child. I do not know which to admire most, the vigor of his understanding or the ready sparkle of his wit."

There can be no doubt that she thoroughly enjoyed these interviews, and we shall have to discount the statement of any observer who gathered a different impression. Mr. George Ticknor Curtis, at whose home some of these interviews took place, was a boy of twelve, and may have taken the play of wit between the parties too seriously. He says, "At first Miss Francis did not like Mr. Child. Their intercourse was mostly banter and mutual criticism. Observers said, 'Those two people will end in marrying.' Miss Francis was not a beautiful girl in the ordinary sense, but her complexion was good, her eyes were bright, her mouth expressive and her teeth fine. She had a great deal of wit, liked to use it, and did use it upon Mr. Child who was a frequent visitor; but her deportment was always maidenly and lady-like."

The engagement happened in this wise. Mr. Child had been admitted to the bar and had opened an office in Boston. One evening about nine o'clock he rode out to Watertown on horseback and called at the Curtises' where Miss Francis then was. "My mother, who believed the denouement had come," says Mr. Curtis, "retired to her chamber. Mr. Child pressed his suit earnestly. Ten o'clock came, then eleven, then twelve. The horse grew impatient and Mr. Child went out once or twice to pacify him, and returned. At last, just as the clock was striking one, he went. Miss Francis rushed into my mother's room and told her she was engaged to Mr. Child."

There are indications in this communication that Mr. Curtis did not himself greatly admire Mr. Child and would not have married him, but he concedes that, "Beyond all doubt, Mrs. Child was perfectly happy in her relations with him, through their long life." After their marriage, he says, they went to housekeeping in a "very small house in Boston," where Mr. Curtis, then a youth of sixteen, visited them and partook of a simple, frugal dinner which the lady cooked and served with her own hands, and to which Mr. Child returned from his office, "cheery and breezy," and we may hope the vivacity of the host may have made up for the frugality of the entertainment.

In "Letters from New York," written to the Boston Courier, she speaks tenderly of her Boston home which she calls "Cottage Place" and declares it the dearest spot on earth. I assume it was this "very small house" where she began her married life, where she dined the fastidious Mr. Curtis, and where she seems to have spent eight or nine happy years. Her marriage brought her great happiness. A friend says, "The domestic happiness of Mr. and Mrs. Child seemed to me perfect. Their sympathies, their admiration of all things good, and their hearty hatred of all things mean and evil, were in entire unison. Mr. Child shared his wife's enthusiasms and was very proud of her. Their affection, never paraded, was always manifest." After Mr. Child's death, Mrs. Child said, "I believe a future life would be of small value to me, if I were not united to him."

Mr. Child was a man of fine intellect, with studious tastes and habits, but there is too much reason to believe that his genius did not lie in the management of practical life. Details of business were apparently out of his sphere. "It was like cutting stones with a razor," says one who knew him. "He was a visionary," says another, "who always saw a pot of gold at the foot of the rainbow." This was a kind of defect which, though it cost her dear, Mrs. Child, of all persons, could most easily forgive. One great success he achieved: that was in winning and keeping the heart of Mrs. Child. Their married life seems to have been one long honeymoon. "I always depended," she says, "upon his richly stored mind, which was able and ready to furnish needed information on any subject. He was my walking dictionary of many languages, and my universal encyclopedia. In his old age, he was as affectionate and devoted as when the lover of my youth; nay, he manifested even more tenderness. He was often singing,

'There's nothing half so sweet in life As love's old dream.'

Very often, when he passed me, he would lay his hand softly on my head and murmur 'Carum Caput.'... He never would see anything but the bright side of my character. He always insisted upon thinking that whatever I said was the wisest and whatever I did was the best."

In the anti-slavery conflict, Mr. Child's name was among the earliest, and at the beginning of the controversy, few were more prominent. In 1832, he published in Boston a series of articles upon slavery and the slave-trade; in 1836, another series upon the same subject, in Philadelphia; in 1837, an elaborate memoir upon the subject for an anti-slavery society in France, and an able article in a London Review. It is said that the speeches of John Quincy Adams in Congress were greatly indebted to the writings of Mr. Child, both for facts and arguments.

Such, briefly, is the man with whom Mrs. Child is to spend forty-five years of her useful and happy life. In 1829, the year after her marriage, she put her twelve months of experience and reflection into a book entitled, "The Frugal Housewife." "No false pride," she says, "or foolish ambition to appear as well as others, should induce a person to live a cent beyond the income of which he is assured." "We shall never be free from embarrassment until we cease to be ashamed of industry and economy." "The earlier children are taught to turn their faculties to some account the better for them and for their parents." "A child of six years is old enough to be made useful and should be taught to consider every day lost in which some little thing has not been done to assist others." We are told that a child can be taught to braid straw for his hats or to make feather fans; the objection to which would be that a modern mother would not let a child wear that kind of hat nor carry the fan.

The following will be interesting if not valuable: "Cheap as stockings are, it is good economy to knit them; knit hose wear twice as long as woven; and they can be done at odd moments of time which would not be otherwise employed." What an age that must have been when one had time enough and to spare! Other suggestions are quite as curious. The book is "dedicated to those who are not ashamed of economy." "The writer," she says, "has no apology to offer for this little book of economical hints, except her deep conviction that such a book is needed. In this case, renown is out of the question; and ridicule is a matter of indifference."

Goethe made poems of his chagrins; Mrs. Child in this instance utilized her privations and forced economies to make a book; and a wonderfully successful book it was. She was not wrong in supposing it would meet a want. During the next seven years, it went through twenty editions, or three editions a year; in 1855, it had reached its thirty-third edition, averaging little short of one edition a year for thirty-six years. Surely this was a result which made a year of economical living in a "very small house" worth while.

"The Frugal Housewife" was a true "mother's book," although another and later volume was so named. "The Mother's Book" was nearly as successful as "The Frugal Housewife," and went through eight American editions, twelve English, and one German. The success of these books gave Mrs. Child a good income, and she hardly needed to be the "frugal housewife" she had been before.

A check soon came to her prosperity. In 1831, she met Garrison and, being inflammable, caught fire from his anti-slavery zeal, and became one of his earliest and staunchest disciples. The free use of the Athenaeum library which had been graciously extended to her ten years before, now enabled her to study the subject of slavery in all its aspects, historical, legal, theoretical, and practical and, in 1833, she embodied the results of her investigations in a book entitled, "An Appeal in behalf of the class of Americans called Africans." The material is chiefly drawn from Southern sources, the statute books of Southern states, the columns of Southern newspapers, and the statements and opinions of Southern public men. It is an effective book to read even now when one is in a mood to rose-color the old-time plantation life and doubtful whether anything could be worse than the present condition of the negro in the South.

The book had two kinds of effect. It brought upon Mrs. Child the incontinent wrath of all persons who, for any reason, thought that the only thing to do with slavery was to let it alone. "A lawyer, afterward attorney-general," a description that fits Caleb Cushing, is said to have used tongs to throw the obnoxious book out of the window; the Athenaeum withdrew from Mrs. Child the privileges of its library; former friends dropped her acquaintance; Boston society shut its doors upon her; the sale of her books fell off; subscriptions to her Juvenile Miscellany were discontinued; and the magazine died after a successful life of eight years; and Mrs. Child found that she had ventured upon a costly experiment. This consequence she had anticipated and it had for her no terrors. "I am fully aware," she says in her preface, "of the unpopularity of the task I have undertaken; but though I expect ridicule, I do not fear it.... Should it be the means of advancing even one single hour the inevitable progress of truth and justice, I would not exchange the consciousness for all Rothschild's wealth or Sir Walter's fame."

Of course a book of such evident significance and power would have had another effect; by his own acknowledgement, it brought Dr. Channing into the anti-slavery crusade, and he published a book upon slavery in 1835; it led Dr. John G. Palfry, who had inherited a plantation in Louisiana, to emancipate his slaves; and, as he has more than once said, it changed the course of Col. T. W. Higginson's life and made him an abolitionist. "As it was the first anti-slavery work ever printed in America in book form, so," says Col. Higginson, "I have always thought it the ablest." Whittier says, "It is no exaggeration to say that no man or woman at that period rendered more substantial service to the cause of freedom, or made such a 'great renunciation' in doing it."

Turning from the real world, which was becoming too hard for her, Mrs. Child took refuge in dreamland and wrote "Philothea: a story of Ancient Greece," published in 1835. Critics have objected that this delightful romance is not an exact reproduction of Greek life, but is Hamlet a reproduction of anything that ever happened in Denmark, or Browning's Saul of anything that could have happened in Judea, a thousand years before Christ? To Lowell, Mrs. Child was and remained "Philothea." Higginson says that the lines in which Lowell describes her in the "Fable for Critics," are the one passage of pure poetry it contains, and at the same time the most charming sketch ever made of Mrs. Child.

"There comes Philothea, her face all aglow; She has just been dividing some poor creature's woe, And can't tell which pleases her most—to relieve His want, or his story to hear and believe. No doubt against many deep griefs she prevails, For her ear is the refuge of destitute tales; She knows well that silence is sorrow's best food, And that talking draws off from the heart its bad blood."

In 1836, Mr. Child went abroad to study the Beet Sugar industry in France, Holland, and Germany and, after an absence of a year and a half, returned to engage in Beet Sugar Farming at Northampton, Mass. He received a silver medal for raw and refined sugar at the Exhibition of the Massachusetts Charitable Mechanics Association in 1839, and a premium of $100 from the Massachusetts Agricultural society the same year. He published a well written and edifying book upon "Beet Sugar," giving the results of his investigations and experiments. It was an enterprise of great promise, but has taken half a century, in this country, to become a profitable industry.

Mrs. Child's letters from 1838 to 1841 are dated from Northampton, where she is assisting to work out the "Beet Sugar" experiment. It would have been a rather grinding experience to any one with less cheerfulness than Mrs. Child. She writes, June 9, 1838, "A month elapsed before I stepped into the woods which were all around me blooming with flowers. I did not go to Mr. Dwight's ordination, nor have I yet been to meeting. He has been to see me however, and though I left my work in the midst and sat down with a dirty gown and hands somewhat grimmed, we were high in the blue in fifteen minutes." Mr. Dwight was Rev. John S. Dwight, Brook Farmer, and editor of Dwight's Journal of Music.

Half of her published letters are addressed to Mr. or Mrs. Francis G. Shaw, parents of Col. Robert G. Shaw. Here is one in 1840, to Mr. Shaw, after she had made a trip to Boston. It will be interesting as presenting a new aspect of Mrs. Child's nature: "The only thing, except meeting dear friends, that attracted me to Boston was the exhibition of statuary.... I am ashamed to say how deeply I am charmed with sculpture: ashamed because it seems like affectation in one who has had such limited opportunity to become acquainted with the arts. I have a little figure of a caryatid which acts upon my spirit like a magician's spell.... Many a time this hard summer, I have laid down my dish-cloth or broom and gone to refresh my spirit by gazing on it a few minutes. It speaks to me. It says glorious things. In summer I place flowers before it; and I have laid a garland of acorns and amaranths at its feet. I do love every little bit of real sculpture."

Her other artistic passion was music, quite out of her reach at this period; but happily, she loved birds and flowers, both of which a Beet Sugar Farm in the Connecticut Valley made possible. A family of swallows made their nest in her woodshed, husband and wife dividing the labors of construction, nursing, and even of incubation, though the male bird did not have the same skill and grace as the lady, in placing his feet and wings. Mrs. Child gives a pretty account of this incident in a letter to one of her little friends, and says, "It seems as if I could watch them forever." Later, in one of her letters to the Boston Courier, she gives a more complete account of the episode. Her observations convinced her that birds have to be taught to fly, as a child is taught to walk.

When birds and flowers went, she had the autumn foliage, and she managed to say a new thing about it: it is "color taking its fond and bright farewell of form—like the imagination giving a deeper, richer, and warmer glow to old familiar truths before the winter of rationalism comes and places trunk and branches in naked outline against the cold, clear sky."

Whether she had been living hitherto in a "rent" we are not told, but in a letter of February 8, 1841, she informs us that she is about to move to a farm on which "is a sort of a shanty with two rooms and a garret. We expect to whitewash it, build a new woodshed, and live there next year. I shall keep no help, and there will be room for David and me. I intend to half bury it in flowers."

There is nothing fascinating in sordid details, but Mrs. Child in the midst of sordid details, is glorious. A month before this last letter, her brother, Prof. Francis, had written her apparently wishing her more congenial circumstances; we have only her reply, from which it appears her father is under her care. She declines her brother's sympathy, and wonders that he can suppose "the deadening drudgery of the world" can imprison a soul in its caverns. "It is not merely an eloquent phrase," she says, "but a distinct truth that the outward has no power over us but that which we voluntarily give it. It is not I who drudge; it is merely the case that contains me. I defy all the powers of earth and hell to make me scour floors and feed pigs, if I choose meanwhile to be off conversing with angels.... If I can in quietude and cheerfulness forego my own pleasures and relinquish my tastes, to administer to my father's daily comfort, I seem to those who live in shadows to be cooking food and mixing medicines, but I am in fact making divine works of art which will reveal to me their fair proportions in the far eternity." Besides this consolation, she says, "Another means of keeping my soul fresh is my intense love of nature. Another help, perhaps stronger than either of the two, is domestic love."

Her Northampton life was nearer an end than she supposed when she wrote these letters; she did not spend the next year in the little farm house with "two rooms and a garret"; on May 27th, she dates a letter from New York city, where she has gone reluctantly to edit the Anti-Slavery Standard. She had been translated from the sphere of "cooking food and mixing medicines" to congenial literary occupations; she had, let us hope, a salary sufficient for her urgent necessities; her home was in the family of the eminent Quaker philanthropist, Isaac T. Hopper, who received her as a daughter, and whose kindness she repaid by writing his biography. However the venture might come out, we would think her life could not well be harder or less attractive than it had been, drudging in a dilapidated farm house, and we are glad she is well out of it. Strange to say, she did not take our view of the situation. We have already seen how independent she was of external circumstances. In a letter referred to, dated May 27, she chides a friend for writing accounts of her outward life: "What do I care whether you live in one room or six? I want to know what your spirit is doing. What are you thinking, feeling, and reading?... My task here is irksome enough. Your father will tell you that it was not zeal for the cause, but love for my husband, which brought me hither. But since it was necessary for me to leave home to be earning somewhat, I am thankful that my work is for the anti-slavery cause. I have agreed to stay one year. I hope I shall then be able to return to my husband and rural home, which is humble enough, yet very satisfactory to me. Should the Standard be continued, and my editing generally desired, perhaps I could make an arrangement to send articles from Northampton. At all events, I trust the weary separation from my husband is not to last more than a year. If I am to be away from him, I could not be more happily situated than in Friend Hopper's family. They treat me the same as a daughter and a sister."

The Anti-Slavery Standard was a new enterprise; its editorship was offered to Mr. and Mrs. Childs jointly; Col. Higginson says that Mr. Child declined because of ill health; another authority, that he was still infatuated with his Beet Sugar, of which Mrs. Child had had more than enough; it appears from her letter that neither of them dreamed of abandoning the Sugar industry; if the enterprise was folly, they were happily united in the folly.

However, of the two, the Anti-Slavery Standard was the more successful enterprise, and at the end of the two years, Mr. Child closed out his Beet Sugar business and joined Mrs. Child in editing the paper. Mrs. Child edited the Standard eight years, six of which were in conjunction with Mr. Child. They were successful editors; they gave the Standard a high literary character, and made it acceptable to people of taste and culture who, whatever their sympathy with anti-slavery, were often repelled by the unpolished manners of Mr. Garrison's paper, The Liberator.

Something of her life outside the Standard office, something of the things she saw and heard and enjoyed, during these eight years, can be gathered from her occasional letters to the Boston Courier. They are interesting still; they will always be of interest to one who cares to know old New York, as it was sixty years ago, or from 1840 onward. That they were appreciated then is evident from the fact that, collected and published in two volumes in 1844, eleven editions were called for during the next eight years. Col. Higginson considers these eight years in New York the most interesting and satisfactory of Mrs. Child's life.

Though we have room for few incidents of this period, there is one too charming to be omitted. A friend went to a flower merchant on Broadway to buy a bunch of violets for Mrs. Child's birthday. Incidentally, the lady mentioned Mrs. Child; she may have ordered the flowers sent to her house. When the lady came to pay for them, the florist said, "I cannot take pay for flowers intended for her. She is a stranger to me, but she has given my wife and children so many flowers in her writings, that I will never take money of her." Another pretty incident is this: an unknown friend or admirer always sent Mrs. Child the earliest wild flowers of spring and the latest in autumn.

I have said that one of her passions was music, which happily she now has opportunities to gratify. "As for amusements," she says, "music is the only thing that excites me.... I have a chronic insanity with regard to music. It is the only Pegasus which now carries me far up into the blue. Thank God for this blessing of mine." I should be glad if I had room for her account of an evening under the weird spell of Ole Bull. Her moral sense was keener than her aesthetic, but her aesthetic sense was for keener than that of the average mortal. Sometimes she felt, as Paul would have said, "in a strait betwixt two"; in 1847 she writes Mr. Francis G. Shaw: "I am now wholly in the dispensation of art, and therefore theologians and reformers jar upon me." Reformer as she was and will be remembered, she was easily drawn into the dispensation of art; and nature was always with her, so much so that Col. Higginson says, "She always seemed to be talking radicalism in a greenhouse."

Mr. and Mrs. Child retired from the Standard in 1849. Her next letters are dated from Newton, Mass. Her father was living upon a small place—a house and garden—in the neighboring town of Wayland, beautifully situated, facing Sudbury Hill, with the broad expanse of the river meadows between. Thither Mrs. Child went to take care of him from 1852 to 1856, when he died, leaving the charming little home to her. There are many traditions of her mode of life in Wayland, but her own account is the best: "In 1852, we made our humble home in Wayland, Mass., where we spent twenty-two pleasant years, entirely alone, without any domestic, mutually serving each other and depending upon each other for intellectual companionship." If the memory of Wayland people is correct, Mr. Child was not with her much during the four years that her father lived. Her father was old and feeble and Mr. Child had not the serene patience of his wife. Life ran more easily when Mr. Child was away. Whatever other period in the life of Mrs. Child may have been the most satisfactory, this must have been the most trying.

Under date of March 23, 1856, happily the last year of this sort of widowhood, she writes: "This winter has been the loneliest of my life. If you knew my situation you would pronounce it unendurable. I should have thought so myself if I had had a foreshadowing of it a few years ago. But the human mind can get acclimated to anything. What with constant occupation and a happy consciousness of sustaining and cheering my poor old father in his descent to the grave, I am almost always in a state of serene contentment. In summer, my once extravagant love of beauty satisfies itself in watching the birds, the insects, and the flowers in my little patch of a garden." She has no room for her vases, engravings, and other pretty things; she keeps them in a chest, and she says, "when birds and flowers are gone, I sometimes take them out as a child does its playthings, and sit down in the sunshine with them, dreaming over them."

We need not think of her spending much time dreaming over her little hoard of artistic treasures. Her real business in this world is writing the history of all religions, or "The Progress of Religious Ideas in Successive Ages." It was a work begun in New York, as early as 1848, finished in Wayland in 1855, published in three large octavo volumes and, whatever its merits or success, was the greatest literary labor of her life.

Under date of July 14, 1848, she writes to Dr. Francis: "My book gets slowly on.... I am going to tell the plain, unvarnished truth, as clearly as I can understand it, and let Christians and Infidels, Orthodox and Unitarians, Catholics, Protestants, and Swedenborgians growl as they like. They will growl if they notice it at all: for each will want his own theory favored, and the only thing I have conscientiously aimed at is not to favor any theory at all." She may have failed in scientific method; but here is a scientific spirit. "In her religious speculations," says Whittier, "Mrs. Child moved in the very van." In Wayland, she considered herself a parishioner of Dr. Edmund H. Sears, whom she calls, "our minister," but she was somewhat in advance of Dr. Sears. Her opinions were much nearer akin to those of Theodore Parker. Only a Unitarian of that type could perhaps at this early period have conceived the history of religion as an evolution of one and the same spiritual element "through successive ages."

She had not much time to dream over her chest of artistic treasures when the assault of Preston S. Brooks upon Senator Sumner called her to battle of such force and point that Dr. William H. Furness said, it was worth having Sumner's head broken.

When death released her from the care of her father, she took "Bleeding Kansas" under her charge. She writes letters to the newspapers; she sits up till eleven o'clock, "stitching as fast as my fingers could go," making garments for the Kansas immigrants; she "stirs up the Wayland women to make garments for Kansas"; she sends off Mr. Child to make speeches for Kansas; and then she writes him in this manner: "How melancholy I felt when you went off in the morning darkness. It seemed as if everything about me was tumbling down; as if I were never to have a nest and a mate any more." Surely the rest of this letter was not written for us to read: "Good, kind, magnanimous soul, how I love you. How I long to say over the old prayer again every night. It almost made me cry to see how carefully you had arranged everything for my comfort before you went; so much kindling stuff split up and the bricks piled up to protect my flowers." Here is love in a cottage. This life is not all prosaic.

Old anti-slavery friends came to see her and among them Charles Sumner, in 1857, spent a couple of hours with her, and left his photograph; she met Henry Wilson at the anti-slavery fair and talked with him an "hour or so." Whittier says, "Men like Charles Sumner, Henry Wilson, Salmon P. Chase, and Governor Andrew availed themselves of her foresight and sound judgment of men and measures."

When John Brown was wounded and taken prisoner at Harper's Ferry, nothing was more in character for Mrs. Child than to offer her services as his nurse. She wrote him under cover of a letter to Gov. Wise, of Virginia. The arrival of Mrs. Brown, made Mrs. Child's attendance unnecessary, but the incident led to a lively correspondence between Mrs. Child and Gov. Wise, in which Mrs. Senator Mason, of Virginia, joined. Neither of her distinguished correspondents possessed the literary skill of Mrs. Child. The entire correspondence was collected in a pamphlet of which 300,000 copies were sold. On a visit to Whittier at Amesbury, a delegation from a Republican political meeting called upon her, saying they wanted to see the woman who "poured hot shot into Gov. Wise."

In 1863, after saying that she is "childish enough to talk to the picture of a baby that is being washed," she writes her friend, Mrs. Shaw, "But you must not suppose that I live for amusement. On the contrary I work like a beaver the whole time. Just now I am making a hood for a poor neighbor; last week I was making flannels for the hospital; odd minutes are filled up ravelling lint; every string that I can get sight of I pull for poor Sambo. I write to the Tribune about him; I write to the Transcript about him; I write to private individuals about him; and I write to the President and members of Congress about him; I write to Western Virginia and Missouri about him; and I get the articles published too. This shows what progress the cause of freedom is making." Not everything went to her mind however. If we think there has been a falling from grace in the public life of our generation, it may do us good to read what she says in 1863: "This war has furnished many instances of individual nobility, but our national record is mean."

In 1864, she published "Looking Toward Sunset," a book designed to "present old people with something wholly cheerful." The entire edition was exhausted during the holiday season; 4,000 copies were sold and more called for. All her profits on the book, she devoted to the freedmen, sending $400 as a first instalment. Not only that, but she prepared a volume called "The Freedman's Book," which she printed at an expense of $600, and distributed among the freedmen 1200 copies at her own cost. She once sent Wendell Phillips a check of $100 for the freedmen, and when he protested that it was more than she could afford, she consented to "think it over." The next day, she made her contribution $200. She contributed $20 a year to the American Missionary Association toward the support of a teacher for the freedmen, and $50 a year to the Anti-Slavery Society. A lady wished, through Mr. Phillips, to give Mrs. Child several thousand dollars for her comfort. Mrs. Child declined the favor, but was persuaded to accept it, and then scrupulously gave away the entire income in charity. It is evident she might have made herself very comfortable, if it had not given her so much more pleasure to make someone else comfortable.

Her dress, as neat and clean as that of a Quakeress, was quite as plain and far from the latest style. A stranger meeting her in a stage coach mistook her for a servant until she began to talk. "Who is that woman who dresses like a peasant, and speaks like a scholar?" he asked on leaving the coach. Naturally, it was thought Mrs. Child did not know how to dress, or, more likely, did not care for pretty things. "You accuse me," she writes to Miss Lucy Osgood, "you accuse me of being indifferent to externals, whereas the common charge is that I think too much of beauty, and say too much about it. I myself think it one of my greatest weaknesses. A handsome man, woman or child can always make a pack-horse of me. My next neighbor's little boy has me completely under his thumb, merely by virtue of his beautiful eyes and sweet voice." There was one before her of whom it was said, "He denied himself, and took up his cross." It was also said of him, "Though he was rich, yet for our sakes he became poor." He never had a truer disciple than Mrs. Child.

Not that she ever talked of "crosses." "But why use the word sacrifice?" she asks. "I never was conscious of any sacrifice." What she gained in moral discipline or a new life, she says, was always worth more than the cost. She used an envelope twice, Wendell Phillips says; she never used a whole sheet of paper when half of one would do; she outdid poverty in her economies, and then gave money as if she had thousands. "I seldom have a passing wish for enlarging my income except for the sake of doing more for others. My wants are very few and simple."

In 1867, Mrs. Child published "A Romance of the Republic," a pathetic story, but fascinating, and admirably written; in 1878, appeared a book of choice selections, entitled, "Aspirations of the World"; and in 1871, a volume of short biographies, entitled "Good Wives," and dedicated, to Mr. Child: "To my husband, this book is affectionately inscribed, by one who, through every vicissitude, has found in his kindness and worth, her purest happiness and most constant incentive to duty."

Mr. Child died in 1874 at the age of eighty, and Mrs. Child followed him in 1880, at the age of seventy-eight. After her death, a small volume of her letters was published, of which the reader will wish there were more. Less than a month before her death, she wrote to a friend a list of benevolent enterprises she has in mind and says, "Oh, it is such a luxury to be able to give without being afraid. I try not to be Quixotic, but I want to rain down blessings on all the world, in token of thankfulness for the blessings that have been rained down upon me."

It is too late to make amends for omissions in this paper, but it would be unjust to Mrs. Child to forget her life-long devotion to the interests of her own sex. In 1832, a year before her "Appeal in behalf of that class of Americans called Africans,"—eleven years before the appearance of Margaret Fuller's "Woman in the Nineteenth Century," Mrs. Child published "A History of the Condition of Women in all ages and nations," showing her disposition to begin every inquiry with a survey of the facts, and also that the "woman question" was the first to awaken her interest. Her greatest contribution to the advancement of women was herself; that is, her own achievements. To the same purpose were her biographies of famous women: "Memoirs of Mme. de Stael and Mme. Roland" in 1847, and sketches of "Good Wives" in 1871. Whittier says, she always believed in woman's right to the ballot, as certainly he did, calling it "the greatest social reform of the age." In one letter to Senator Sumner, she directly argues the question: "I reduce the argument," she says, "to very simple elements. I pay taxes for property of my own earning, and I do not believe in 'taxation without representation.'" Again: "I am a human being and every human being has a right to a voice in the laws which claim authority to tax him, to imprison him, or to hang him."

A light humor illuminates this argument. Humor was one of her saving qualities which, as Whittier says, "kept her philanthropy free from any taint of fanaticism." It contributed greatly to her cheerfulness. Of her fame, she says playfully: "In a literary point of view I know I have only a local reputation, done in water colors."

Could anything have been better said than this of the New England April or even May: "What a misnomer in our climate to call this season Spring, very much like calling Calvinism religion." Nothing could have been keener than certain points scored in her reply to Mrs. Senator Mason. Mrs. Mason, remembering with approving conscience her own ministries in the slave cabins caring for poor mothers with young babies, asks Mrs. Child, in triumph, if she goes among the poor to render such services. Mrs. Child replies that she has never known mothers under such circumstances to be neglected, "and here at the North," said she, "after we have helped the mothers, we do not sell the babies." After Gen. Grant's election to the Presidency, a procession with a band from Boston, marched to her house and gave her a serenade. She says that she joined in the hurrahs "like the strong-minded woman that I am. The fact is, I forgot half the time whether I belonged to the stronger or weaker sex." Whether she belonged to the stronger or weaker sex, is still something of a problem. Sensible men would be willing to receive her, should women ever refuse to acknowledge her.

Wendell Phillips paid her an appreciative tribute, at her funeral. "There were," he said, "all the charms and graceful elements which we call feminine, united with a masculine grasp and vigor; sound judgment and great breadth; large common sense and capacity for everyday usefulness, endurance, foresight, strength, and skill." The address is given in full in the volume of "Letters." There is also a fine poem by Whittier for the same occasion:

"Than thine was never turned a fonder heart To nature and to art;

Yet loving beauty, thou couldst pass it by, And for the poor deny Thyself...."

The volume contains a poetical tribute of an earlier date, by Eliza Scudder, of which Mrs. Child said, "I never was so touched and pleased by any tribute in my life. I cried over the verses and I smiled over them." I will close this paper with Miss Scudder's last stanza:

"So apt to know, so wise to guide, So tender to redress,— O, friend with whom such charms abide, How can I love thee less?"



IV

DOROTHEA LYNDE DIX



The career of Dorothy Dix is a romance of philanthropy which the world can ill afford to forget. It has been said of her, and it is still said, that she was "the most useful and distinguished woman America has yet produced." It is the opinion of Mr. Tiffany, her biographer, that as the founder of institutions of mercy, she "has simply no peer in the annals of Protestantism." To find her parallel one must go to the calendar of the Catholic saints,—St. Theresa, of Spain, or Santa Chiara, of Assisi. "Why then," he asks, do the "majority of the present generation know little or nothing of so remarkable a story!" Till his biography appeared, it might have been answered that the story had never been told; now, we should have to say that, with a thousand demands upon our time, it has not been read.

Dorothea Lynde Dix—born February 11, 1802—was the daughter of Joseph Dix and granddaughter of the more eminent Dr. Elijah Dix, of Worcester, later of Boston, Mass. Dr. Dix was born in Watertown, Mass., in 1747. At the age of seventeen, he became the office boy of Dr. John Green, an eminent physician in Worcester, Mass., and later, a student of medicine. After five years, in 1770, he began to practice as physician and surgeon in Worcester where he formed a partnership with Dr. Sylvester Gardner. It must have been a favorable time for young doctors since in 1771, a year after he began to practice, he married Dorothy Lynde, of Charlestown, Mass., for whom her little granddaughter was named. Mrs. Dix seems to have been a woman of great decision of character, and no less precision of thought and action, two traits which reappeared conspicuously in our great philanthropist.

Certain qualities of Dr. Dix are also said to have reappeared in his granddaughter. He was self-reliant, aggressive, uncompromising, public-spirited, and sturdily honest. To his enterprise, Worcester owed its first shade trees, planted by him, when shade trees were considered great folly, and also the Boston and Worcester turnpike, when mud roads were thought to be divinely appointed thoroughfares. His integrity is shown by an incident which also throws light upon the conditions of a troubled period. His partner, Dr. Gardner, made the grave mistake of taking the royal side in the controversies that preceded the Revolution, and Worcester became as hot for him as Richmond or Charleston was for a Union man in 1861. Dr. Gardner disappeared, leaving his effects behind him. After the war, Dr. Dix made a voyage to England and honorably settled accounts with his former partner.

It was like the enterprising Dr. Dix that he turned this creditable act to his financial advantage. On his return to America he brought with him a stock of medical books, surgical instruments, and chemical apparatus, and became a dealer in physician's supplies, while continuing the practice of his profession. His business prospering, in 1795 he removed to Boston for a larger field, where he opened a drug store near Faneuil Hall and established chemical works in South Boston. Successful as physician, druggist and manufacturer, he soon had money to invest. Maine, with its timber lands, was the Eldorado of that era, and Dr. Dix bought thousands of acres in its wilderness, where Dixfield in the west, and Dixmont in the east, townships once owned by him, preserve his name and memory.

The house of Dr. Dix in Boston, called the "Dix Mansion," was on Washington St., corner of Dix Place, then Orange Court. It had a large garden behind it, where originated the Dix pear, once a favorite. Dr. Dix died in 1809, when Dorothea was seven years old. Young as she was, he was among the most vivid of her childhood memories and by far the pleasantest. She seems to have been a favorite with him and it was his delight to take her in his chaise on his rounds, talking playfully with her and listening to her childish prattle.

Joseph Dix, the father of Dorothea, is a vague and shadowy memory. He seems to have had little of his father's energy or good sense. Unstable in many of his ways, he lived a migratory life, "at various spots in Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont, as well as in Worcester and Boston, Mass." When Dorothea was born, he was living at Hampden, Maine, adjoining his father's Dixmont properties, presumably as his father's land agent. He probably tired of this occupation because it interfered with his business. His business seems to have been religion. He was a prolific author of religious literature. He was a philanthropist after his kind, giving his time without stint to the writing of religious tracts, and spending his money in publishing them, with little benefit to the world and much detriment to his family. In the stitching and pasting of these tracts, the whole household were required to assist and it was against this irksome taskwork that Dorothea, at the age of twelve, rebelled, running away from Worcester, where the family then lived, and finding a refuge with her grandmother in Boston. Dorothea afterwards educated her two brothers, one of whom became a sea captain and the other a Boston merchant.

Dorothea Dix was created by her Maker, but she was given in a plastic state, first into the hands of inexorable Madam Dix, and next into those of the all-pitying Dr. Channing. Madam Dix is described as a fine specimen of the dignified, precise, conscientious New England gentlewoman of her generation. Industry, economy, and above all thoroughness were the chief articles of her religion, and she instilled these virtues into the mind of her granddaughter by the most vigorous discipline. A week of solitary confinement was among the penalties inflicted upon the hapless child who had failed to reach the standard of duty prescribed for her. The standard, with Madam Dix, did not differ from perfection discernibly. Mr. Tiffany quotes a lady who in her girlhood, as a special reward of merit, was allowed to make an entire shirt under the supervision of Madam Dix. It was an experience never forgotten. No stitch in the entire garment could be allowed to differ perceptibly from every other, but the lady spoke of the ordeal with enthusiastic gratitude, declaring that it had been a life-long benefit to her to have been compelled to do one piece of work thoroughly well.

"I never knew childhood," Miss Dix said pitifully in after life. Certainly with this exacting grandmother, there can be no childhood as it is understood to-day; but if Dorothea submits to the rigorous discipline enforced upon her, she will make a woman of iron fibre who will flinch from no hardship and will leave no task undone. Happily she did submit to it. The alternative would have been to return to her half-vagabond father. Too much discipline or too little was her destiny. She preferred to take the medicine in excess, and in the end was grateful for it.

Dorothea was so apt a pupil and so ambitious that, at the age of fourteen, she returned to Worcester and opened a school for small children, prudently lengthening the skirts and sleeves of her dress to give dignity and impressiveness to her appearance. Half a century later one of these pupils vividly recalled the child-teacher, tall of her age, easily blushing, at once beautiful and imposing in manner, but inexorably strict in discipline.

Dorothea spent the next four years in Boston in preparation for a more ambitious undertaking and, in 1821 at the age of nineteen, she opened a day school in Boston in a small house belonging to Madam Dix. The school prospered and gradually expanded into a day and boarding school, for which the Dix mansion, whither the school was removed, furnished convenient space. Madam Dix, enfeebled by age and infirmities, laid down the scepter she had wielded, and the premises passed virtually into the hands of Dorothea. Thither came pupils from "the most prominent families in Boston" and other Massachusetts towns, and even from beyond the limits of the State. There also she brought her brothers to be educated under her care and started upon a business career.

Hardly had she started her school for the rich and fortunate before, anticipating her vocation as a philanthropist, she opened another for the poor and destitute. A letter is preserved in which she pleadingly asks the conscientious but perhaps stony Madam Dix for the loft over the stable for this purpose. "My dear grandmother," she begins, "Had I the saint-like eloquence of our minister, I would employ it in explaining all the motives, and dwelling on the good, the good to the poor, the miserable, the idle, the ignorant, which would follow your giving me permission to use the barn chamber for a school-room for charitable and religious purposes."

The minister with saint-like eloquence was Dr. Channing. The letter is valuable as showing the source of the flame that had fired her philanthropic soul. For the finer culture of the heart she had passed from the hands of Madam Dix to those of Dr. Channing. The request for the room was granted and Mr. Tiffany tells us that "The little barn-school proved the nucleus out of which years later was developed the beneficent work of the Warren Street Chapel, from which as a centre spread far and wide a new ideal of dealing with childhood. There first was interest excited in the mind of Rev. Charles Barnard, a man of positive spiritual genius in charming and uplifting the children of the poor and debased."

Letters from Miss Dix at this period show that she had a sensitive nature, easily wrought upon, now inflamed to action and now melted to tears. "You say that I weep easily. I was early taught to sorrow, to shed tears, and now, when sudden joy lights up or unexpected sorrow strikes my heart, I find it difficult to repress the full and swelling tide of feeling." She is reading a book of poems and weeping over it,—"paying my watery tribute to the genius" of the poet. She longs for similar talents that she "might revel in the luxury of those mental visions that must hourly entrance a spirit that partakes less of earth than heaven." It will be remembered that her father was religious even to folly. Here was his child, only by judicious training, the stream was turned into channels of wise beneficence.

With the management of two schools, the supervision of the household, the care of two younger brothers, and ministries to her grandmother already advanced in years, Miss Dix was sufficiently occupied, but she found time to prepare a text-book upon "Common Things," gathering the material as she wrote. This, her first attempt at book-making, issued in 1824, was kept in print forty-five years, and went to its sixtieth edition in 1869. It was followed the next year by "Hymns for Children" selected and altered, and by a book of devotions entitled, "Evening Hours." Lengthening the day at both ends, "rising before the sun and going to bed after midnight," working while others slept, gave time for these extra tasks. Nature exacted her usual penalties. In the third year of this arduous labor, threatenings of lung troubles appeared which, however, she defied even when "in conducting her classes she had to stand with one hand on a desk for support, and the other pressed hard to her side as though to repress a hard pain." Meanwhile she wrote a bosom friend: "There is in our nature a disposition to indulgence, a secret desire to escape from labor, which unless hourly combated will overcome the best faculties of our minds and paralyse our most useful powers.... I have often entertained a dread lest I should fall a victim to my besieger, and that fear has saved me thus far."

Besides the terror of lapsing into self-indulgence, she was stimulated to activity by the care of her brothers, for one of whom she seems to have felt special anxiety: "Oh, Annie," she writes, "if that child is good, I care not how humble his pathway in life. It is for him my soul is filled with bitterness when sickness wastes me; it is because of him I dread to die." Was there no one to advise her that the best care of her brother would be to care for herself, and that if she would do more, she must first do less! Where was Dr. Channing who, more than any other, was responsible for her intemperate zeal! It appears that Dr. Channing, "not without solicitude," as he writes her, was watching over his eager disciple. "Your infirm health," he says, "seems to darken your prospect of usefulness. But I believe your constitution will yet be built up, if you will give it a fair chance. You must learn to give up your plans of usefulness as much as those of gratification, to the will of God."

Miss Dix abandoned her school apparently in 1827, after six years of service and at the age of twenty-five. The following spring and summer she spent as a governess in the family of Dr. Channing at his summer home in Rhode Island. Her duties were light and she lived much in the open air, devoting her leisure to botany in which she was already "no mean proficient," and to "the marine life of the beautiful region." Very pretty letters were exchanged between her and Dr. Channing at the termination of the engagement. "We will hear no more of thanks," he wrote her, "but your affection for us and our little ones we will treasure among our most precious blessings." He invites her to renew the relations another year, and so she did.

To avoid the rigors of a New England climate, Miss Dix, for some years, spent her winters, now in Philadelphia, now in Alexandria, Va., keeping herself busy with reading "of a very multifarious kind,—poetry, science, biography, and travels,—besides eking out the scanty means she had laid by from her teaching by writing stories and compiling floral albums and books of devotion." In 1827, she published a volume of "Ten Short Stories for Children" which went to a second edition in 1832; in 1828, "Meditations for Private Hours," which went through several editions; in 1829, two little books, "The Garland of Flora," and "The Pearl, a Christmas Gift." Occasional brief engagements in teaching are also recorded in this period.

The winter of 1830, she spent with the Channings on the Island of St. Croix, in the West Indies, in her old capacity as governess. A daughter of Dr. Channing gives an interesting account of the preceptress of whom, first and last, she had seen so much. She describes Miss Dix as tall and dignified, very shy in manner, strict and inflexible in discipline. "From her iron will, it was hopeless to appeal. I think she was a very accomplished teacher, active and diligent herself, very fond of natural history and botany. She enjoyed long rambles, always calling our attention to what was interesting in the world around us. I hear that some of her pupils speak of her as irascible. I have no such remembrance. Fixed as fate we considered her."

Miss Dix returned from the West Indies in the spring, very much improved in health, and in the autumn, she reopened her school in the Dix Mansion, with the same high ideals as before and with such improved methods as experience had suggested. Pupils came to her again as of old and she soon had as many attendants as her space permitted. A feature of the school was a letter-box through which passed a daily mail between teacher and pupils and "large bundles of child-letters of this period" are still extant, preserved by Miss Dix with scrupulous care to the end of life. It was a bright child who wrote as follows: "I thought I was doing well until I read your letter, but when you said that you were rousing to greater energy, all my satisfaction vanished. For if you are not satisfied in some measure with yourself and are going to do more than you have done, I don't know what I shall do. You do not go to rest until midnight and then you rise very early." The physician had administered too strong a tonic for the little patient's health.

A lady who, at the age of sixteen, attended this school in 1833, writes of her eminent teacher as follows: "She fascinated me from the first, as she had done many of my class before me. Next to my mother, I thought her the most beautiful woman I had ever seen. She was in the prime of her years, tall and of dignified carriage, head finely shaped and set, with an abundance of soft, wavy, brown hair." The school continued in the full tide of success for five years, during which time, by hard labor and close economies, Miss Dix had saved enough to secure her "the independence of a modest competence." This seems a great achievement, but if one spends nothing for superfluities and does most of his labor himself, he can lay by his income, much or little. The appointments of the school are said to have been very simple, a long table serving as a desk for study, when it was not in use for dinner. Only one assistant is mentioned, who gave instruction in French and, perhaps, elementary Latin. Surely Miss Dix could handle the rest herself. The merit of the school was not in its elaborate appointments, but in the personal supervision of its accomplished mistress. So the miracle was wrought and at the age of thirty-three, Miss Dix had achieved a modest competence.

The undertaking had cost her her health once before, and now it cost her her health again. The old symptoms, a troublesome cough, pain in the side, and slight hemorrhages, returned and, having dragged her frail body through the winter of 1836, Miss Dix reluctantly closed her school in the spring and, in obedience to her physician, went to Europe for rest, with the intention of spending the summer in England, the autumn in France, and the winter in Italy. Prostrated by the voyage, she was carried to a hotel in Liverpool where she was put to bed with the forlorn prospect of being confined to her solitary room for an indefinite period of convalescence. But again Dr. Channing befriended her. From him she had received letters of introduction, one of which brought to her side Mr. William Rathbone, a wealthy merchant of Liverpool and a prominent English Unitarian. Mr. and Mrs. Rathbone insisted upon taking her to their home, a charming residence a few miles out of the city. Thither she consented to go for a visit of a few weeks, and there she remained, as an honored guest tenderly cared for, for eighteen months. "To the end of her days," says her biographer, "this period of eighteen months stood out in her memory as the jubilee of her life, the sunniest, the most restful, and the tenderest to her affections of her whole earthly experience." She wrote a Boston friend, "You must imagine me surrounded by every comfort, sustained by every tenderness that can cheer, blest in the continual kindness of the family in which Providence has placed me,—I with no claim but those of a common nature." And again, "So completely am I adopted into the circle of loving spirits that I sometimes forget I really am not to consider the bonds transient in their binding."

She very much needed these friends and their tender care. Nine months after her arrival, we hear of occasional hemorrhages from which she has been exempt for ten days, the pain in her side less acute, and her physician has given her permission to walk about her room. One would think that her career was practically ended, but, strange to say, the career which was to make her famous had not yet begun. From this date, her convalescence proceeded steadily, and she was able to enjoy much in the delightful home and refined social circle in which she found herself. "Your remark," she writes a friend, "that I probably enjoy more now in social intercourse than I have ever before done is quite true. Certainly if I do not improve, it will be through wilful self-neglect." Apparently, she was having a glimpse of a less prosaic existence than the grinding routine of a boarding school. Madam Dix died at the age of ninety-one, leaving her granddaughter, still in Europe, a substantial legacy, which sensibly increased her limited resources and, when the time came for action, left her free to carry out her great schemes of benevolence without hampering personal anxieties. It ought to preserve the memory of Madam Dix that she endowed a great philanthropist.

In the autumn of 1837, Miss Dix returned to America, and avoiding the New England climate, spent the winter in Washington, D. C., and its neighborhood. Apparently, it was not a wholly happy winter, chiefly because of her vain and tender longings for the paradise she had left across the sea. The Washington of 1837 seemed raw to her after the cultivated English home she had discovered. "I was not conscious," she writes a friend, "that so great a trial was to meet my return from England till the whole force of the contrast was laid before me.... I may be too craving of that rich gift, the power of sharing with other minds. I have drunk deeply, long, and Oh, how blissfully, at this fountain in a foreign clime. Hearts met hearts, minds joined with minds, and what were the secondary trials of pain to the enfeebled body when daily was administered the soul's medicine and food." Surely, that English experience was one upon which not every invalid from these shores could count, but when, a few years later, Miss Dix returned to England as a kind of angel of mercy, giving back much more than she had ever received, the Rathbone family must have been glad that they had befriended her in her obscurity and her need.

It was in 1841 at the age of thirty-nine that the second chapter in the life of Miss Dix began. Note that she had as little thought that she was beginning a great career as any one of us that he will date all his future from something he has done or experienced to-day. It happened that Dr. J. T. G. Nichols, so long the beloved pastor of the Unitarian parish in Saco, Maine, was then a student of Divinity at Cambridge. He had engaged to assist in a Sunday School in the East Cambridge jail, and all the women, twenty in number, had been assigned to him. The experience of one session with his class was enough to convince him that a young man was very much out of place in that position and that a woman, sensible if possible, but a woman certainly, was necessary. His mother advised him to consult Miss Dix. Not that her health would permit her to take the class, but she could advise. On hearing Mr. Nichols' statement, Miss Dix deliberated a moment and then said, "I will take the class myself." Mr. Nichols protested that this was not to be thought of, in the condition of her health, but we have heard of her iron will: "Fixed as fate we considered her," said one of her pupils; and she answered Mr. Nichols, "I shall be there next Sunday."

This was the beginning. "After the school was over," says Dr. Nichols, "Miss Dix went into the jail and found among the prisoners a few insane persons with whom she talked. She noticed that there was no stove in their rooms and no means of proper warmth." The date was the twenty-eighth of March and the climate was New England, from which Miss Dix had so often had to flee. "The jailer said that a fire for them was not needed, and would be unsafe. Her repeated solicitations were without success." The jailer must have thought he was dealing with a woman, not with destiny. "At that time the court was in session at East Cambridge, and she caused the case to be brought before it. Her request was granted. The cold rooms were warmed. Thus was her great work commenced."

Such is Dr. Nichols' brief statement, but the course of events did not run so smoothly as we are led to suppose. The case had to be fought through the newspapers as well as the court, and here Miss Dix showed the generalship which she exhibited on many another hard fought field. She never went into battle single-handed. She always managed to have at her side the best gunners when the real battle began. In the East Cambridge skirmish, she had Rev. Robert C. Waterston, Dr. Samuel G. Howe, and Charles Sumner. Dr. Howe visited the jail and wrote an account for the Boston Advertiser. When this statement was disputed, as it was, Mr. Sumner, who had accompanied Dr. Howe, confirmed his account and added details of his own. He said that the inmates "were cramped together in rooms poorly ventilated and noisome with filth;" that "in two cages or pens constructed of plank, within the four stone walls of the same room" were confined, and had been for months, a raving maniac and an interesting young woman whose mind was so slightly obscured that it seemed any moment as if the cloud would pass away; that "the whole prison echoed with the blasphemies of the poor old woman, while her young and gentle fellow in suffering seemed to shrink from her words as from blows;" that the situation was hardly less horrid than that of "tying the living to the dead."

Where was Miss Dix during this controversy? Why, she was preparing to investigate every jail and almshouse in the State of Massachusetts. If this was the way the insane were treated in the city of Cambridge, in a community distinguished for enlightenment and humanity, what might not be going on in more backward and less favored localities? Note-book in hand, going from city to city and from town to town, Miss Dix devoted the two following years to answering this question exhaustively.

Having gathered her facts, she presented them to the Legislature in a Memorial of thirty-two octavo pages, the first of a series of seventeen statements and appeals presented to the legislatures of different states, as far west as Illinois and as far south as Louisiana. "I shall be obliged," she said, "to speak with great plainness and to reveal many things revolting to the taste, and from which my woman's nature shrinks with peculiar sensitiveness.... I proceed, gentlemen, briefly to call your attention to the present state of insane persons within this Commonwealth, in cages, closets, cellars, stalls, pens, chained, naked, beaten with rods and lashed into obedience.... I give a few illustrations but description fades before reality." If we could dismiss the subject by saying she reports instance after instance where men and women were confined in the almshouses in Massachusetts in such conditions of inhumanity and neglect as no intelligent farmer would tolerate for his swine, we could avoid some unpleasant details; but the statement would be ineffective because it would seem incredible. At the almshouse in Danvers, confined in a remote, low, outbuilding, she found a young woman, once respectable, industrious and worthy, whose mind had been deranged by disappointments and trials. "There she stood," says Miss Dix, "clinging to or beating upon the bars of her caged apartment, the contracted size of which afforded space only for increasing accumulations of filth,—a foul spectacle; there she stood, with naked arms, dishevelled hair, the unwashed frame invested with fragments of unclean garments, the air so extremely offensive, though ventilation was afforded on all sides but one, that it was not possible to remain beyond a few moments without retreating for recovery to the outward air. Irritation of body, produced by utter filth and exposure, incited her to the horrid process of tearing off her skin by inches; her neck and person were thus disfigured to hideousness.... And who protects her," Miss Dix suggestively asks, "who protects her,—that worse than Pariah outcast,—from other wrongs and blacker outrages!" This question had more meaning for Miss Dix than we might suppose, for at the almshouse in Worcester she had found an insane Madonna and her babe: father unknown.

Fair and beautiful Newton finds a place in this chapter of dishonor, with a woman chained, nearly nude, and filthy beyond measure: "Sick, horror-struck, and almost incapable of retreating, I gained the outward air." A case in Groton attained infamous celebrity, not because the shame was without parallel but because the overseers of the poor tried to discredit the statements of Miss Dix. The fact was that she had understated the case. Dr. Bell of the McLean Asylum, confirmed her report and added details. In an outbuilding at the almshouse, a young man, slightly deranged but entirely inoffensive, was confined by a heavy iron collar to which was attached a chain six feet in length, the limit of his possible movements. His hands were fastened together by heavy clavises secured by iron bolts. There was no window in his dungeon, but for ventilation there was an opening, half the size of a sash, closed in cold weather by a board shutter. From this cell, he had been taken to the McLean Asylum, where his irons had been knocked off, his swollen limbs chafed gently, and finding himself comfortable, he exclaimed, "My good man, I must kiss you." He showed no violence, ate at the common table, slept in the common bedroom, and seemed in a fair way to recovery when, to save the expense of three dollars a week for his board and care, the thrifty Groton officials took him away. He could be boarded at the almshouse for nothing, and, chained in an outbuilding, he would not require any care.

We can follow Miss Dix in her career through a dozen states of this Union, into the British Provinces, to Scotland and England, thence across to the Continent, without repeating these details, if we bear in mind that such as we have seen was the condition of the pauper insane at that period. Her memorial was presented by Dr. S. G. Howe, then happily a member of the Legislature, and a bill was passed, not without opposition, but finally passed, enlarging the asylum at Worcester to accommodate two hundred additional patients. The provision was inadequate, but a reform of old abuses had begun. It was her first victory.

Grateful for what had been accomplished in Massachusetts, Miss Dix turned to Rhode Island, whose borders she had often approached and sometimes crossed in her investigations in the adjoining state. Rhode Island was perhaps not less civilized than her neighbor, but Rhode Island furnished the prize case of horrors in the mistreatment of insanity, a case which in a letter introducing the discoverer, Mr. Thomas G. Hazard said went beyond anything he supposed to exist in the civilized world. The case was this: Abraham Simmons, a man whose name ought to go on the roll of martyrdom, was confined in the town of Little Compton, in a cell seven feet square, stone-built, stone-roofed, and stone-floored, the entrance double-walled, double-doored and double-locked, "excluding both light and fresh air, and without accommodation of any description for warming and ventilation." When this dungeon was discovered, the walls were covered by frost a half inch in thickness; the bed was provided with two comfortables, both wet and the outer one stiffly frozen, or, as Miss Dix puts it, "only wet straw to lie upon and a sheet of ice for his covering." Lest two locks should not be enough to hold this dangerous man, his leg was tethered to the stone floor by an ox-chain. "My husband," said the mistress, "in winter, sometimes of a morning rakes out half a bushel of frost, and yet he never freezes; sometimes he screams dreadfully and that is the reason we had the double wall and two doors in place of one; his cries disturb us in the house." "How long has he been here?" "Oh, above three years." Nothing in the traditions of the Bastile could exceed these horrors, and yet they were not the product of intentional cruelty, but of unfathomable stupidity.

Disregarding the well-meant warnings of her attendant that he would kill her, Miss Dix took his hands, tried to warm them in her own, spoke to him of liberty, care and kindness, and for answer "a tear stole over his hollow cheeks, but no words answered my importunities." Her next step was to publish the terrible story in the Providence Journal, not with a shriek, as might have been expected and justified, but with the affected coolness of a naturalist. With grim humor, she headed her article, "Astonishing Tenacity of Life," as if it had only a scientific interest for anybody. If you doubted the statements, you might go and see for yourself: "Should any persons in this philanthropic age be disposed from motives of curiosity to visit the place, they may rest assured that travelling is considered quite safe in that part of the country, however improbable it may seem. The people of that region profess the Christian religion, and it is even said that they have adopted some forms and ceremonies which they call worship. It is not probable, however, that they address themselves to poor Simmons' God." Their prayers and his shrieks would make a strange discord, she thinks, if they entered the ear of the same deity.

Having reported her discoveries to the men of science, she next appealed to the men of wealth. Providence had at that date a multi-millionaire, by the name of Butler; he left four millions to his heirs. He had never been known as a philanthropist; he did not himself suppose that his heart was susceptible. It is said that knowing persons smiled when they heard that Miss Dix intended to appeal to him. Further, it is said that Mr. Butler, at the interview, ingeniously diverted the conversation from topics that threatened to be serious. He apparently had no thought of giving Miss Dix a penny. At length she rose with the impressive dignity so often noted by her pupils and said: "Mr. Butler, I wish you to hear what I have to say. I want to bring before you certain facts involving terrible suffering to your fellow creatures all around you,—suffering you can relieve. My duty will end when I have done this, and with you will rest all further responsibility." Mr. Butler heard her respectfully to the end, and then asked, "What do you want me to do?" "Sir," she said, "I want you to give $50,000 toward the enlargement of the insane hospital in this city." "Madam, I'll do it," he said, and much more of his estate afterward went the same way.

Three years of devoted study of the problems of insanity, with limitless opportunities for personal observation, had given Miss Dix an expert knowledge of the subject. She had conceived what an insane asylum should be. Hitherto, she had been content to enlarge upon foundations already laid; now she would build an asylum herself. She saw, we are told, that such an institution as she conceived could not be built by private benevolence, but must have behind it a legislative appropriation. She chose New Jersey as the field of her experiment. Quietly, she entered the state and canvassed its jails and almshouses, as she had those of Massachusetts and Rhode Island. Next she digested her facts in a Memorial to the Legislature. Then, with a political shrewdness for which she became celebrated, she selected the member, uniting a good heart with a clear head and persistent will, into whose hands it should be placed. Much of her success is said to have been due to her political sagacity. The superintendent of one of her asylums said, "She had an insight into character that was truly marvellous; and I have never known anyone, man or woman, who bore more distinctly the mark of intellectuality." Having placed her Memorial in the hands of a skilful tactician, she retired to a room appropriated to her use by the courtesy of the House, where she spent her time writing editorials for newspapers, answering the questions of members, and holding receptions. "You cannot imagine," she writes a friend, "the labor of conversing and convincing. Some evenings I had at once twenty gentlemen for three hours' steady conversation." After a campaign of two months the bill establishing the New Jersey State Lunatic Asylum was passed, and the necessary money appropriated for its erection. She was always partial to this first creation of her energy and genius. She called it 'her first child,' and there, forty-five years later, she returned to pass the last seven years of her life, as in a home, a room having been gratefully appropriated to her use by the trustees of the asylum.

At this date, Dr. S. G. Howe wrote her: "God grant me to look back upon some three years of my life with a part of the self-approval you must feel. I ask no higher fortune. No one need say to you, Go on! for you have heard a higher than any human voice, and you will follow whithersoever it calleth." Indeed, she already had much of her future work prepared. While waiting for the Legislature in New Jersey to take up her bill, she had canvassed Pennsylvania and had the happiness to see a bill pass the Legislature of that State founding the Dixmont Hospital, her second child, soon after the birth of her first. The Dixmont Hospital is the only one of her many children that she would allow to be even indirectly named for her. Meanwhile, she had canvassed Kentucky, had been before the Legislature in Tennessee, and, seven days after the passage of her bill in New Jersey, she writes from a steamer near Charleston, S. C., as follows: "I designed using the spring and summer chiefly in examining the jails and poorhouses of Indiana and Illinois. Having successfully completed my mission in Kentucky, I learned that traveling in those States would be difficult, if not impossible, for some weeks to come, on account of mud and rains. This decided me to examine the prisons and hospitals of New Orleans, and, returning, to see the state prisons of Louisiana at Baton Rouge, of Mississippi at Jackson, of Arkansas at Little Rock, of Missouri at Jefferson City, and of Illinois at Alton.... I have seen incomparably more to approve than to censure in New Orleans. I took the resolution, being so far away, of seeing the state institutions of Georgia, Alabama, and South Carolina. Though this has proved excessively fatiguing, I rejoice that I have carried out my purpose."

Between June 1843 and August 1847, she states in a letter that she traveled 32,470 miles, her conveyance being by steamboat when possible; otherwise by stage-coach. It is suggestive of the wrecks and delays she had experienced with the shattered coaches and mud roads of the south and west that, as we are told, she "made a practice of carrying with her an outfit of hammer, wrench, nails, screws, a coil of rope, and straps of stout leather, which under many a mishap sufficed to put things to rights and enable her to pursue her journey." "I have encountered nothing so dangerous as river fords," she writes. "I crossed the Yadkin when it was three-quarters of a mile wide, rough bottom, often in places rapid currents; the water always up to the carriage bed, and sometimes flowing in. The horses rested twice on sand-bars. A few miles beyond the river having just crossed a deep branch two hundred yards wide, the axletree broke, and away rolled one of the back wheels."

When she said that river fords were her greatest danger, she must have forgotten an encounter with a highwayman. She was making a stage journey in Michigan, and noticed with some consternation that the driver carried a brace of pistols. To her inquiries he explained that there had been robberies on the road. "Give me the pistols," she said; "I will take care of them." More in awe of her than of robbers, the driver reluctantly obeyed. Passing through a dismal forest the expected happened. A man seized the horses and demanded her purse. She made him a little speech, asked if he was not ashamed, told him her business, and concluded, "If you have been unfortunate, are in distress and in want of money, I will give you some." Meanwhile the robber had turned "deathly pale," and when she had finished, exclaimed, "My God, that voice." He had once heard her address the prisoners in the Philadelphia penitentiary. He begged her to pass, and declined to take the money she offered. She insisted, lest he might be again tempted before he found employment. People obeyed when she insisted, and he took her gift and disappeared.

Think of the hotel accommodations,—the tables and beds,—she must have encountered in these wild journeys. This is the woman who, a few years ago, seemed to be dying with hemorrhages of the lungs. Did she have no more of them? Oh, yes; we are assured that "again and again she was attacked with hemorrhages and again and again prostrated by malarial fever." A physician said, "Her system became actually saturated with malaria." Invalid as she almost always was, she had left her foot-prints in most of the states of the Union and had carried the war into the British Provinces, where she had been the means of establishing three insane hospitals: one in Toronto, one in Halifax, one at St. John, Newfoundland, besides providing a fleet of life-boats at Sable Island, known as "The Graveyard of Ships," off the coast of Nova Scotia.

In the United States, during these twelve years, she "promoted and secured," to use her own phrase, the enlargement of three asylums: at Worcester, Mass., at Providence, R. I., and at Utica, N. Y., and the establishment of thirteen, one in each of the following states: New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Indiana, Illinois, Kentucky, Missouri, Tennessee, Mississippi, Louisiana, Alabama, North Carolina, and Maryland, with the Hospital for Insane Soldiers and Sailors, at Washington, D. C.

In 1850, Miss Dix proposed a larger scheme of philanthropy than was ever before projected by any mortal. What is more, but for one man, she would have carried it out. She petitioned Congress to appropriate 12,000,000 acres of public lands for the benefit of the indigent insane, deaf and dumb, and blind. A bill to that effect was introduced, watched by her through two sessions, and finally passed by both Houses. She was inundated with congratulations from far and near; but the bill was vetoed on constitutional grounds by President Pierce. The day for giving away the public lands in sheets had not come.

The blow seems to have been more than Miss Dix could endure. She went abroad for change and rest. What rest meant to her, she expresses in a letter to a friend at home:

"Rest is not quitting the active career: Rest is the fitting of self to its sphere."

These lines, borrowed from John S. Dwight have been, not unnaturally, attributed to her. She wrote many things perhaps quite as poetical.

Not much of the verse, which came from her prolific pen, was considered even by herself to deserve publication, but verse-writing is said to had been the never-failing diversion of her leisure hours. Mrs. Caroline A. Kennard credits her with the following lines which, though very simple, are quite as good as much that has been immortalized in our hymn books:

"In the tender, peaceful moonlight, I am from the world apart, While a flood of golden glory Fills alike my room and heart.

As I gaze upon the radiance Shining on me from afar, I can almost see beyond it,— Almost see 'the gates ajar.'

Tender thoughts arise within me Of the friends who've gone before, Absent long but not forgotten, Resting on the other shore.

And my soul is filled with longing That when done with earth and sin, I may find the gates wide open There for me to enter in."

Apparently, she wrote her poetry for herself, as an unskilled musician might play for his own amusement.

The rest which Miss Dix allowed herself between September 1854 and September 1856, was to visit the chief hospitals and prisons in Europe. Edinburgh, the Channel Islands, Paris, Rome, Naples, Constantinople, Vienna, St. Petersburg, Stockholm, Copenhagen, Amsterdam, Brussels, and again Paris and London: these places mark the course of her two years' pilgrimage among the prisons and hospitals of Europe. She found much to admire in this journey, but sometimes abuses to correct. We must content ourselves with an incident from Edinburgh, perfectly in character. She found in that city private insane hospitals, if they could be dignified by the name, under such conditions of mismanagement as shocked even her experienced nerves. Having reported the facts to the Lord Provost of Edinburgh to no purpose, she was advised to lay the matter before the Home Secretary in London. The Provost knew of this intention and resolved to forestall her by taking the train for London the next morning; so little did he know Miss Dix. She boarded the night train, and was on the spot before him, had her interview, secured the appointment of a royal commission and, ultimately the correction of the abuses of which she had complained.

During the four years that intervened between her return and the outbreak of the Civil War, she seems to have travelled over most of her old ground in this country, and to have extended her journeys into the new states and territories. At the approach of hostilities, it fell to Miss Dix to give the President of the Philadelphia and Baltimore Railroad the first information of a plot to capture the city of Washington and to assassinate Mr. Lincoln. Acting upon this information, Gen. Butler's Massachusetts troops were sent by boat instead of rail, and Mr. Lincoln was "secretly smuggled through to Washington."

By natural selection, Miss Dix was appointed Superintendent of Women Nurses in the federal service, by order of the Secretary of War. In this capacity she served through the four years' struggle. In a letter dated December 7, 1864, she writes: "I take no hour's leisure. I think that since the war, I have taken no day's furlough." Her great services were officially recognized by Edwin M. Stanton, Secretary of War.