Lives of Girls Who Became Famous (3 of 111)

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HARRIET BEECHER STOWE (CONTÂ'D)

At seven, with a remarkably retentive memory,--a thing which many of
us spoil by trashy reading, or allowing our time and attention to
be distracted by the trifles of every-day life,--Harriet had learned
twenty-seven hymns and two long chapters of the Bible. She was
exceedingly fond of reading, but there was little in a poor minister's
library to attract a child. She found _Bell's Sermons_, and _Toplady
on Predestination_. "Then," she says, "there was a side closet full of
documents, a weltering ocean of pamphlets, in which I dug and toiled
for hours, to be repaid by disinterring a delicious morsel of a _Don
Quixote_, that had once been a book, but was now lying in forty or
fifty _dissecta membra_, amid Calls, Appeals, Essays, Reviews, and
Rejoinders. The turning up of such a fragment seemed like the rising
of an enchanted island out of an ocean of mud." Finally _Ivanhoe_ was
obtained, and she and her brother George read it through seven times.

At twelve, we find her in the school of Mr. John P. Brace,
a well-known teacher, where she developed great fondness for
composition. At the exhibition at the close of the year, it was
the custom for all the parents to come and listen to the wonderful
productions of their children. From the list of subjects given,
Harriet had chosen, "Can the Immortality of the Soul be proved by the
Light of Nature?"

"When mine was read," she says, "I noticed that father brightened
and looked interested. 'Who wrote that composition?' he asked of Mr.
Brace. '_Your daughter, sir!_' was the answer. There was no mistaking
father's face when he was pleased, and to have interested _him_ was
past all juvenile triumphs."

A new life was now to open to Harriet. Her only sister Catharine,
a brilliant and noble girl, was engaged to Professor Fisher of Yale
College. They were to be married on his return from a European tour,
but alas! the _Albion_, on which he sailed, went to pieces on the
rocks, and all on board, save one, perished. Her betrothed was never
heard from. For months all hope seemed to go out of Catharine's life,
and then, with a strong will, she took up a course of mathematical
study, _his_ favorite study, and Latin under her brother Edward. She
was now twenty-three. Life was not to be along the pleasant paths she
had hoped, but she must make it tell for the future.

With remarkable energy, she went to Hartford, Conn., where her brother
was teaching, and thoroughly impressed with the belief that God had a
work for her to do for girls, she raised several thousand dollars and
built the Hartford Female Seminary. Her brothers had college doors
opened to them; why, she reasoned, should not women have equal
opportunities? Society wondered of what possible use Latin and moral
philosophy could be to girls, but they admired Miss Beecher, and
let her do as she pleased. Students poured in, and the seminary soon
overflowed. My own school life in that beloved institution, years
afterward, I shall never forget.

And now the little twelve-year-old Harriet came down from Litchfield
to attend Catharine's school, and soon become a pupil-teacher, that
the burden of support might not fall too heavily upon the father.
Other children had come into the Beecher home, and with a salary of
eight hundred dollars, poverty could not be other than a constant
attendant. Once when the family were greatly straitened for money,
while Henry and Charles were in college, the new mother went to bed
weeping, but the father said, "Well, the Lord always has taken care of
me, and I am sure He always will," and was soon fast asleep. The next
morning, Sunday, a letter was handed in at the door, containing a $100
bill, and no name. It was a thank-offering for the conversion of a
child.

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