aggravating as the laws. They delighted in extracts from Shakespeare,
especially from "The Taming of the Shrew," an admirable satire in itself
on the old common law of England. I hated Petruchio as if he were a real
man. Young Bayard would recite with unction the famous reply of Milton's
ideal woman to Adam: "God thy law, thou mine." The Bible, too, was
brought into requisition. In fact it seemed to me that every book taught
the "divinely ordained" headship of man; but my mind never yielded to
this popular heresy.




CHAPTER III.

GIRLHOOD.


Mrs. Willard's Seminary at Troy was the fashionable school in my
girlhood, and in the winter of 1830, with upward of a hundred other
girls, I found myself an active participant in all the joys and sorrows
of that institution. When in family council it was decided to send me to
that intellectual Mecca, I did not receive the announcement with unmixed
satisfaction, as I had fixed my mind on Union College. The thought of a
school without boys, who had been to me such a stimulus both in study
and play, seemed to my imagination dreary and profitless.

The one remarkable feature of my journey to Troy was the railroad from
Schenectady to Albany, the first ever laid in this country. The manner
of ascending a high hill going out of the city would now strike
engineers as stupid to the last degree. The passenger cars were pulled