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 ...

THE STORY OF MY LIFE.

Sunday evening was devoted to the religious instruction
of the children at home. Of this my father took charge,
while my mother
in company with
friends or neighSbors attended sert vice at one of the
Si F churches in the near
vicinity First
/ came thecatechism,
'o < through which we,i w went every Sunday
"evening, my father
occasionally enforcs ing a precept or expounding an obscure point. If
Sthat catechism is
SPECTERS EVERYWHERE. lost, hopelessly, I
Trembling with fright I clung to my father.
can at any time reproduce it, question and answer, verbatim et literatim,
for it is burned into my memory forever. Then followed
the Bible reading, in which we all took part, and after this
a plain, practical talk from my father concerning the salvation of our souls and the dangers under which we lived while
unconverted. This never affected my sisters as it did me.
I was sometimes shaken to the very center of my being, and
often expressed to my father, even when very young, what I
frequently felt,--a bitter regret that I had ever been born.
There were times when I envied the cat that purred at the
fireside, or the dog that slept on the doors'tep. They could
be happy, for they had no souls to be saved or lost.
There was one person whom we dreaded more than the