Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER II GIRLHOOD The periods into which life naturally divides itself—those of preparation and education, of active labor, and of decline—are least clearly marked in lives of greatest power and most earnest purpose. For great power is likely to show itself in useful labor during the years which are usually given to education, and earnest purpose persists to the end, carrying with it the demand for continued training. Thus dividing lines are obscured. If Ellen Swallow had been a person of only average energy and average strength of purpose, we might now be able to speak of her days at Westford as a period given to education, and to point to the places which were most intimately connected with her life there and say: "Here at the academy on the Common she was educated; there in the little store across the way her father worked to support his family and to educate his daughter; and there a short distance down the orchard-lined street, in the white house among the flowers, her mother made the family home." But so great was her energy and so independent her spirit, that shenot only took an important part in the home- making, but also insisted upon helping to raise the money for her own education. Naturally quicker than her father, and with a greater aptitude for the details of business, she became his constant assistant in the store. At the same time her mother and she, freed from the harder labor which farm life brings to women, found time from their housework to make the little home bud and blossom with the flowers of which they both were passionately fond. During the Westford period, therefore, she took a real part in the work which was going on about her, and was not removed from it for purposes of education. These years, instead of being given wholly to preparation, re...