of rosy girlhood, the only beauty I could understand; and wherein her
toil-set features differed from those of the other drudging farmers' wives
or the shut-in women of the little village, I could not see.

A lump rose in my throat; this wrinkled and aging person was the beautiful
woman I might take after!

I'm afraid I returned from church that day without the consolations of
religion.

There followed an anxious time of experimenting. Some one had told me that
lemon juice would exorcise freckles, and surreptitiously I tried it. How
my face smarted after the heroic treatment, and how red and inflamed it
looked! But then in a little while back came the freckles again and they
stayed, too, until--but how they went, I am to tell you.

I wheedled from mother the privilege of daily wearing my coral beads--the
ones my cousins Milly and Ethel Baker had sent me from New York--and had
an angry fit of crying when one day, while we children were racing for the
schoolhouse door at the end of recess, the string broke and they were
nearly all trampled upon before I could pick them up.

Youth is buoyant. Next I begged the sheet lead linings of tea chests from
the man who kept the general store, and cut them into little strips that I
folded into hair-curlers, covering them with paper so that the edges
should not cut. I would go to sleep at night with my short, dampened hair
twisted around these contrivances, and in the morning comb it out and
admire it as it stood about my head in a bushy mass, like the Circassian
girl's at the circus.