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 ...

PIONEER TEACHERS AND EDUCATORS.

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less orator of the country. Through the ideally happy halfcentury of their marriage, she sank into hopeless invalidism,
when her husband became her tireless and devoted fiurse
and care-taker. " Wendell is my better three-quarters," she
always said of him. But he called her his "counselor"
and "spiritual instructor," and craved her suggestions in
the preparation of his lectures, and her criticism when they
were completed.
I remember Mary Lyon, the founder of Mount IIolyoke
Seminary, who visited the Charlestown Female Seminary
while I was in attendance as a student, and later, as a
teacher. She was the immediate predecessor of the noble
women who have worked for the opening of colleges and
universities to the girls of our day Wise beyond the women
of heIf generation, she adopted, as motives to progress, principles that later were successfully employed at Rugby by
Dr. Arnold, and built her school on such solid foundations
that it lives to-day, and has developed into a well-equipped
college. Later, I was enriched by the acquaintance of two
other superb pioneer teachers, - Catherine Beecher, the eldest sister of Henry Ward Beecher, who, in the utter absence
of normal schools, established a training school for teachers
herself, and sent large numbers of them West. Elizabeth
Peabody, the intimate friend and biographer of Dr. Channing, and a very superior educator, laid all mothers under
obligations of gratitude by establishing the Kindergarten in
America, and so, in one sense, became the mother of all
children.
I was associated with Dorothea Dix, during the war, in
hospital work and the superintendence of nurses. "This
work is only an episode in my life," she said to me; "'my life
work is to found insane asylums, and to better the condition
of paupers, lunatics, and prisoners." Philanthropy was her