braid hair in thirteen strands, but the pencil was never obedient
in their fingers, and the pen and ink-pot were a horror from
early childhood to the end of time.

Not so with Rebecca; her pencil moved as easily as her tongue,
and no more striking simile could possibly be used. Her
handwriting was not Spencerian; she had neither time, nor
patience, it is to be feared, for copybook methods, and her
unformed characters were frequently the despair of her teachers;
but write she could, write she would, write she must and did, in
season and out; from the time she made pothooks at six, till now,
writing was the easiest of all possible tasks; to be indulged in
as solace and balm when the terrors of examples in least common
multiple threatened to dethrone the reason, or the rules of
grammar loomed huge and unconquerable in the near horizon.

As to spelling, it came to her in the main by free grace, and not
by training, and though she slipped at times from the beaten
path, her extraordinary ear and good visual memory kept her from
many or flagrant mistakes. It was her intention, especially when
saying her prayers at night, to look up all doubtful words in her
small dictionary, before copying her Thoughts into the sacred
book for the inspiration of posterity; but when genius burned
with a brilliant flame, and particularly when she was in the barn
and the dictionary in the house, impulse as usual carried the
day.

There sits Rebecca, then, in the open door of the Sawyers barn
chamber--the sunset door. How many a time had her grandfather,
the good deacon, sat just underneath in his tipped-back chair,