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 ...

WE START HOUSEKEEPING.

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only the moral reform work undertaken by the Washingtonians, has led to its translation into several languages by
missionaries, so that altogether the unpretentious little
sketch has run quite an eventful life. Nearly a year later,
Abel Tompkins, a publisher on Cornhill, offered a similar prize for a story which should elucidate the changes
wrought in one's life and character by a vital change of religious belief. I was competent to write a sketch of that
kind, and needed only to narrate my own experience, which
I did, in part, and I won that prize also. It was not successful in winning the interest of the public, as its publisher
had hoped, and was re-written, and changed in plan, and
then published under a new title, "A Mental Transformation." But it won no larger success than at first.
At last we stumbled upon the location and the house
which suited our tastes and purse exactly, hired it, and went
to " housekeeping." Wendell Phillips used to protest against
"American housekeeping." "Whein two persons in America
marry and go to keeping house,'' he used to say, " they hire
more rooms than they need, buy double the things they
want, hire two or three people to help them, and then all
of them just devote themselves to keeping the establishment
in order." We tried to avoid the unwisdom which he censured, and to arrange our home on so simple a scale, that it
should include only the indispensable accessories to decent
and comfortable living, which should not burden us with
their care. ' We would not be slaves to a house!" we
said.
Our house contained but six rooms, modestly furnished,
and, as my husband added, " conveniently arranged." I did
not know whether they were or not, for I had had no experience, and was very ignorant concerning domestic affairs.
This was a new phase of life to me, to be mastered just as