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.

whom neither the fear of man nor the grace of Godl ever
sweetened.
It was not reg-arded as proper for children to sleep in
church, as they were to hear the text and remember it. If
I nodded, my father's red bandanna handkerchief came flirt..
ing down the pewv so skillfully that it gave me a little slap
in the face, waking me like the blast of a trumpet. When
there was a baby in the house I was sent to my Grandmother
Asliton's on North Russell street to spend every alternate
Sunday. I suspect from what I can remember that it was
found necessary that I should "leave my country for my
country's good." However that may be, I was supremely
happy in the visits, and mourned inconsolably when they
were ended, for when I went to church with the indulgent
grandmother I wvas allowed to sleep all through the sermon.
She was a communicant of the Charles Street Baptist church,
of which Rev. Dr Sharp was minister. Because I never
heard the sermnon I supposed Dr Sharp never preached one.
He called at my grandmother's one afternoon and had much
to say to me in a pleasant way, finally inquiring, " if I loved
to go to church?" I answered promptly and with enthusiasm, "1Oh, yes; I like to go to your church, because you
never preach sermons, as Mr. Wayland does."
On my eighth birthday my aunt, Mary Ashton, for
whom I was named, made me a birthday gift of " Robinson
Crusoe," bound in red and thickly illustrated with hideous
wood-cuts, which to me, in my ignorance, possessed divine
beauty. Books were rare in those days, and I was wild
with delight. It was Sunday, but I forgot it, and four
times was caught devouring the story. I was warned that