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.

weekly lyceum lectures of the town, delivered by Charles
Sumner, Dr. Chapin, Horace Greeley, Theodore Parker, Dr.
Oliver Wendell Holmes, and men of like calibre, but we
found no time for a review of the lectures afterwards.
There was an incessant ringing of the door-bell, and
calls for some sort of service. There were funerals to
attend, as well as marriages to solemnize,- sick people to
visit,- poor people to relieve,- agents in the interest of
every conceivable Christian, religious, and moral enterprise
to meet and entertain, who must be introduced personally,
to everybody possessing money or influence,--there were
committee meetings, conference meetings, society meetings,
church meetings, anti-slavery meetings, temperance meetings, all with fixed regular dates, that could not be
avoided,- parish calls to be made and returned,--the cares
and perplexities of housekeeping, to which time and
thought must be given,--to say nothing of the unexpected
events and occasions that "happen" almost daily,- was
there no way out of this tangle of unclassified and unsystematized work? No, there was not. We had begun
wrong We had made no reservation of ourselves, or our
time, at the start, but had placed all that we had and were
at the service of the people, and it was too late to make a
change.
It was a mistake, and we saw it. No one, however large
may be his mental equipment, can afford to spend himself
in any service, without constant replenishing. We were
pauperizing ourselves, mentally and spiritually. If we
were going to work for others, we must have seasons of
withdrawal from friends even, when we could study, think,
and repair the inevitable waste of one's self that comes from
labor or pleasure. We could not continue this fearful rush
from one engagement to another, - this ending of one form