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.

Bay, sometimes returning with mackerel enough for the
breakfast of the whole town. We organized sailing parties
and rowing matches; we picnicked together under the "teaparty tree," in the pine woods, a well-known trysting-place
for generations; and in cooler weather, enjoyed the fish and
clam-chowder parties, held in some one of the many large
kitchens of the town, where the good cheer could be supplemented by music and dancing.
On one holiday excursion we started off for Clark's Island,
famed for bearing the name of the master's mate of the.fayflower, taking with us games, violins, and lunches, prepared for a day of enjoyment. Time passed so happily and
fleetly, that the tide left us before we were aware that it was
on the ebb. It was between two and three o'clock in the
morning before the tide served for our return, and then the
wind had left us, and the boys were obliged to row to the
Duxbury shore. Nobody, however, seemed to regret the
mishap, for all were in the halcyon days of youth, the hospitable people of the island opened their homes to those who
sought shelter from the evening damps, and the boys declared "rowing Was the tallest sort of fun," notwithstanding some of them showed blistered hands. And they rowed
into town, and walked to their homes in the early morning,
lustily singing in chorus,
"Home again! home again! from a foreign shore!'
as if they had been off a thousand leagues, and absent a
year.
After a protracted and violent storm, almost cyclonic in
its force and fury, some of my older boy pupils would invite
me to a drive to some near, safe point, where we could see
the Gurnet lighthouse, bravely upholding its twin lights
amid the mighty billows that had raged around it, as if deo