dreamings I had often pictured myself as grown up and matured; I had
even pictured my womanhood so far as tying two of Hannah's long aprons
about my waist, one in front and the other behind, and with a shawl
thrown cornerwise over my shoulders, to fancy myself a lady in "long
dresses" like the "Miss Hartmanns" that called upon my step-mother.

I had wished to be the wife of a great, rich man, that I might do as I
pleased with myself, and be "somebody" with my airs and graces, but I
had never met such an obstacle in the long rambles of my reverie as
"going to school." When, therefore, the subject was thrust upon me
without any preparation, I felt as if I had seen a ghost and was told
to go and speak to it, that it wouldn't harm me; and, lest the reader
should attribute my emotion to a more natural, and, I dare say,
becoming sentiment, I will confess that it was owing purely to the
nervous shock which I sustained at the unexpected mention of so
important a change in my life, that my eyes filled up with tears, and
that I gave way to other ambiguous signs of appropriate agitation.

All this, however, was neither here nor there, so far as the fixed
intention of my parents was concerned to dispose of me for an
indefinite period of time, and within three weeks of that day when the
announcement was first made to me, I was crying myself to sleep in a
narrow little bed, hundreds of miles away from my father's house.

Perhaps there was not another girl among the three hundred boarders of
Notre Dame Abbey, that had such little reason to be home-sick as Amey
Hampden; and yet--God help us! into what strange moods we are prone to
fall! When a wide-spreading distance had thrust itself between me and
the home of my early days, I could not help feeling that, after all,
my heart had tendrils like other people's, and that this separation