The story of my life ; or, The sunshine and shadow of seventy years / by Mary A. Livermore ... with hitherto unrecorded incidents and recollections of three years' experience as an army nurse in the great Civil War, and reminiscences of twenty-five years' experiences on the lecture platform ... to which is added six of her most popular lectures ... with portraits and one hundred and twenty engravings from designs by eminent artists ...

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THE STORY OF MY LIFE.

early, between the hours of three and four in the morning,
walk a mile or more to her father's house, where her telescope was mounted, and was half frozen in the effort. But
what of that? I was compensated by a look through the
telescope under her direction, and by listening to her
explanations and suggestions, which were sure to set my
imagination on fire and give wings to my fancy.
To sit with Miss Richardson, the teacher of Latin, with
the AEneid open before us, listening to her comments upon
this wonderful poem; her historic account of the days and
circumstances under which it was written; to dream of the
far-away past when the world seemed to throb with a love
of poetry and art as it had not since; to go home laden
with books that made more clear the idea of the Roman
poet, and over which I was sure to speculate until the
evening ran far into the night, --all this enriched my life
beyond my power to express. Even Playfair's Euclid,
under the instruction of Miss Carter, became more interesting than a novel. I was so absorbed in my studies, so eager
to master everything taught in the institution, that I frequently provoked the laughter of my teachers, who would
remind me that there was a day after to-day.
There was only one drawback, and that grew out of the
ever-present and morbid fear that the expense of my education was endroaching too heavily on the slender resources of
my parents. I had suffered from my earliest life, as I have
already stated, from this morbid sensitiveness. Whenever I
presented a bill to my father for the payment of books and
tuition, I counted it a dark day in my calendar, to be observed with anguish and tears. I did not understand that
the happiness of both my parents was heightened by their
efforts to educate their children, and in witnessing their progress. To them my anxiety seemed so absurd that when I