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.

ble, the horses slow and poky, and the driver seemed intent
on showing me how nearly he could upset the carriage,
without actually doing so. Where the road was not a com

'

"WHO'B GETTING OUT NOW, HE OR I?"

mon cart-path through the woods, it ran through "old fields,"
as they were called, entirely grown over with tall, coarse
grass. They were once productive tracts of land, but had
long since been exhausted by the peculiar method of southern agriculture, which forced successive crops of tobacco
or. corn, without enriching the soil. When the land was
worn out by this wasteful process it was abandoned as though
it had been cursed, and no effort made to restore it. It became an "old field," and the grand old forests were felled
to furnish more land for the raising of corn and tobacco.