Lives of Girls Who Became Famous (1 of 111)

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LIVES OF GIRLS WHO BECAME FAMOUS.

BY SARAH K. BOLTON,

AUTHOR OF "POOR BOYS WHO BECAME FAMOUS," "SOCIAL STUDIES IN ENGLAND,"
ETC.


1914

TO

MY AUNT,

MRS. MARTHA W. MILLER,
Whose culture and kindness I count
among the blessings of
my life.


PREFACE.


All of us have aspirations. We build air-castles, and are probably the
happier for the building. However, the sooner we learn that life is
not a play-day, but a thing of earnest activity, the better for us and
for those associated with us. "Energy," says Goethe, "will do anything
that can be done in this world"; and Jean Ingelow truly says, that
"Work is heaven's hest."

If we cannot, like George Eliot, write _Adam Bede_, we can, like
Elizabeth Fry, visit the poor and the prisoner. If we cannot, like
Rosa Bonheur, paint a "Horse Fair," and receive ten thousand dollars,
we can, like Mrs. Stowe and Miss Alcott, do some kind of work to
lighten the burdens of parents. If poor, with Mary Lyon's persistency
and noble purpose, we can accomplish almost anything. If rich, like
Baroness Burdett-Coutts, we can bless the world in thousands of ways,
and are untrue to God and ourselves if we fail to do it.

Margaret Fuller said, "All might be superior beings," and doubtless
this is true, if all were willing to cultivate the mind and beautify
the character.

S.K.B.


HARRIET BEECHER STOWE.

[Illustration: HARRIET BEECHER STOWE.]


In a plain home, in the town of Litchfield, Conn., was born, June 14,
1811, Harriet Beecher Stowe. The house was well-nigh full of little
ones before her coming. She was the seventh child, while the oldest
was but eleven years old.

Her father, Rev. Lyman Beecher, a man of remarkable mind and sunshiny
heart, was preaching earnest sermons in his own and in all the
neighboring towns, on the munificent salary of five hundred dollars a
year. Her mother, Roxana Beecher, was a woman whose beautiful life has
been an inspiration to thousands. With an education superior for those
times, she came into the home of the young minister with a strength of
mind and heart that made her his companion and reliance.

There were no carpets on the floors till the girl-wife laid down a
piece of cotton cloth on the parlor, and painted it in oils, with a
border and a bunch of roses and others flowers in the centre. When one
of the good deacons came to visit them, the preacher said, "Walk in,
deacon, walk in!"

"Why, I can't," said he, "'thout steppin' on't." Then he exclaimed, in
admiration, "D'ye think ya can have all that, _and heaven too_?"

So meagre was the salary for the increasing household, that Roxana
urged that a select school be started; and in this she taught
French, drawing, painting, and embroidery, besides the higher English
branches. With all this work she found time to make herself the idol
of her children. While Henry Ward hung round her neck, she made dolls
for little Harriet, and read to them from Walter Scott and Washington
Irving.

These were enchanting days for the enthusiastic girl with brown curls
and blue eyes. She roamed over the meadows, and through the forests,
gathering wild flowers in the spring or nuts in the fall, being
educated, as she afterwards said, "first and foremost by Nature,
wonderful, beautiful, ever-changing as she is in that
cloudland, Litchfield. There were the crisp apples of the pink
azalea,--honeysuckle-apples, we called them; there were scarlet
wintergreen berries; there were pink shell blossoms of trailing
arbutus, and feathers of ground pine; there were blue and white and
yellow violets, and crowsfoot, and bloodroot, and wild anemone, and
other quaint forest treasures."

A single incident, told by herself in later years, will show the
frolic-loving spirit of the girl, and the gentleness of Roxana
Beecher. "Mother was an enthusiastic horticulturist in all the small
ways that limited means allowed. Her brother John, in New York, had
just sent her a small parcel of fine tulip-bulbs. I remember rummaging
these out of an obscure corner of the nursery one day when she was
gone out, and being strongly seized with the idea that they were good
to eat, and using all the little English I then possessed to persuade
my brothers that these were onions, such as grown people ate, and
would be very nice for us. So we fell to and devoured the whole; and I
recollect being somewhat disappointed in the odd, sweetish taste, and
thinking that onions were not as nice as I had supposed. Then mother's
serene face appeared at the nursery door, and we all ran toward her,
and with one voice began to tell our discovery and achievement. We had
found this bag of onions, and had eaten them all up.

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