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 ...

AN IMPORTANT STEP.,9

395

at the fury of the storm that burst upon me. No similar
manifestation of sectarian prejudice would be possible now,
for all sects have gained - in religious toleration, during the
last fifty years. Friends forsook me, acquaintances ostracized me, I was disapproved by the church, and'for a time

MR. AND MRS. LIVERMORE.
A reproduction of an old daguerreotype taken the day after their wedding, May 7, 1845.
my father was inconsolable. My mother alone congratulated me upon my marriage with a man, in whose favor she
decided on her first interview with him. Dr. Keale was
absent in Europe, and I greatly missed the influence he
wotild have exerted in my favor. As my critics were clearly
in the wrong, and I realized hourly that the great blessedness into which I had entered more than compensated for