welcoming us than our own home folks showed regret at our departure.
It was a liberal education to me. They all seemed to understand about
the hideous wig, but never showed that they noticed it. One of our
first callers was a popular, eloquent clergyman, who kissed me "as
the daughter of my mother." He said, "I loved your mother and asked
her to marry me, but I was refused." Several young men at once wanted
to get up a weekly dancing class for me, but I was timid, fearing my
wig would fall off or get wildly askew. Whittier in one of his poems
has this couplet, which suggests the reverse of my experience:

"She rose from her delicious sleep,
And laid aside her soft-brown hair."

At bedtime my wig must come off and a nightcap take the place. In the
morning that wig must go on, with never one look in the glass. Soon
two persons called, both leaders in social life, one of them a
physician, who had suddenly lost every spear of hair. I was invited by
the unfortunate physician and his wife to dine with them. And, in his
own home, I noticed in their parlour a portrait of him before his
experience. He had been blessed with magnificently thick black hair, a
handsome face, adorned with a full beard and moustache. It was an
April evening and the weather was quite warm, and after dinner the
doctor removed his wig, placing it on a plaster head. He was now used
to his affliction. He told me, as he sat smoking, looking like a
waxwork figure, how several years ago he awoke in the dead of the
night to find something he could not understand on his pillow. He
roused his wife, lit the gas, dashed cold water on his face to help
him to realize what had happened and washed off all the rest of his
hair, even to eyebrows and eyelashes. That was a depressing story to
me. And I soon met a lady (the Mayor's wife) who had suffered exactly