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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414 THE STORY OF MY LIFE@

nature was so prodigal of beautiful effects, in the arrangement of hill and valley, grove, river, and meadow. Not being able to rent a house that suited us, we bought one whose
charm of location had attracted us from the outset. It
stood a little apart from the other homes of the village, on
the southern slope of a gentle elevation, and commanded an
extensive view of the town and surrounding country. A
branch of the Willimantic River, which furnished power to
the factories above us, ran through our valley, where it was
halted by a mill-dam, that it might turn the wheels of other
factories located on the stream below. The mill-pond lay in
the very lap of the valley, and was the glory of the town,
for it took on the proportions and beauty of a lake, in which
the encompassing hills mirrored themselves, as well as the
steeples of the churches, and the cupolas of the mills. The
southern and western windows of our house took in "the
Pretty picture of the pond in its grassy banks,vand the view
of the town beyond, which, after stepping daintily down
the long hill, house by house, had ranged itself in the valley, in the regular form of a crescent.
Behind our house was a grove of maple and beech trees,
whose abundant foliage formed its background from early
spring until the last red and flame-colored leaves dropped in
the autumn. Then the denuded trees, serried in irregular
clumps, protected us from, the strong sweep of winter wvinds,
which sometimes rushed down the valley with relentless
fury. Attractive as was the house and its location, it utterly lacked conveniences, and was desolate and undesirable
within. The builder had partitioned it off into seventeen
rooms, some of them so small that three persons crowded