she was absorbed in the third volume, her younger sister Sarah came to the door and was refused admittance. She peeped through the keyhole and told her mother that Lucy was reading something with the door locked. The mother came up to investigate. She was shocked and distressed. Lucy begged hard for leave to finish the story. Rhoda added her assurances that it really was not a bad book, and the gentle mother, with many misgivings, consented. But it was years before Lucy read another novel.
As a child she had a high temper. Once when Sarah had angered her, and Lucy was chasing her through the house, she caught sight in a looking-glass of her own face, white with wrath. She said to herself, "That is the face of a murderer! " She went out and sat down on a stone behind the woodshed, and rocked herself to and fro, holding one bare foot in her hand and thinking how she could ever get the better of such a temper. She had an overwhelming sense that it was something which she must do alone; nobody could help her. She decided that when she was angry she must not speak; if she could refrain from breaking forth into such a flow of wrathful words, that would be the first step. She sat on the rock till it grew so dark that her mother called her in.
From that time on, she set herself seriously to conquer her temper. Luther did not make it easier. He was a tease. When he had taunted her till she grew angry, he would say, "See Luce's nose turn up! See it! See it!" Lucy's nose turned up by nature; but at this it would turn up more and more, and her face grow as red as a beet. He had no idea of the struggle going on within her. Then she would go away across the pastures to the Hemlock Hill and sit down where the sweet voice of the little brook and the soft sough of the wind in the trees helped to calm her. Those who saw her great gentleness in later life found it hard to realize that her temper had ever been so fiery.
When she was about twelve years old, she saw her mother's health giving way under the hard work, and quietly made up her mind that, if some one must be killed by overwork, she could be spared better than her mother. A strong and resolute child, she took upon herself as many as she could of her mother's burdens. The school was so far away that the children took their lunches with them and stayed till the afternoon. Now, rising very early on Monday mornings, Lucy would do the washing for the family of ten or twelve persons, hang out the clothes to dry, walk a mile to school, walk back at noon and bring the clothes in, and return for the afternoon session. She toiled early and late. Even her robust health suffered under the strain and she grew weak and pale. In those days paleness was admired. To be pale was to look "delicate." She hid her fatigue from her mother. When so tired that she could hardly stand, she would slip upstairs and lie down for a few minutes; but if she heard her mother's foot on the stair, she would at once spring up and pretend to be busy. At night, after the work was done, she sat up to study.
Things kept happening that strengthened her zeal for equal rights. Mary Lyon, the pioneer of education for women in New England, was raising money for Mount Holyoke Seminary. She spoke before the sewing circle of the West Brookfield church and told of the great lack of educational opportunities for girls. Lucy listened, her heart growing hotter and hotter within her. The sewing circle was working to educate a theological student, and Lucy was making a shirt. She thought how absurd it was for her to be working to help educate a student who could earn more money toward his own education in a week, by teaching, than she could earn toward hers in a month; and she left the shirt unfinished and hoped that no one ever would complete it.
Her father did not like to buy schoolbooks for her. He told her she could use her brother's. Once he refused to get her a necessary textbook, which he thought quite superfluous for a girl. "I went to the woods, with my little bare toes, and gathered chestnuts, and sold them for money enough to buy the book. I felt a prouder sense of triumph than I have ever known since," she said, when telling the story. After that, when she wanted books, she picked berries and nuts and sold them. She joined with other ambitious pupils to secure a college student as teacher for the school, so that they might learn more than the ordinary branches.
The teacher boarded with the Stone family. Once, when he saw Lucy go out into the pasture, catch the horses, bring them in and harness them, he told her that she ought to be a missionary's wife and live at the foot of the Rocky Mountains. This young man awakened in Lucy the first stirrings of the tender passion; but she kept her feelings strictly in her own breast. Her mind was made up never to marry.
She was not beautiful. Her father said, "Luce's face is like a blacksmith's apron; it keeps off the sparks." She told him with indignation that she did not mean to marry, and that she wished her face was even plainer. Yet, in spite of her irregular features, she was very attractive. She had a pretty figure, a beautiful rosy complexion, which remained with her through life, bright gray eyes, good teeth, a profusion of dark brown hair, unusually fine and silky, which was very little gray at her death, much personal magnetism, and a singularly sweet voice. She had also a mind as bright and swift as quicksilver, and that indescribable something which radiates from a character strong, simple and sincere. Many hearts were drawn to her. Until her marriage, which took place late in life, she never lacked wooers.
She joined the Orthodox Congregational Church of West Brookfield while still in her teens. The subject of slavery was agitating the churches more and more. William Lloyd Garrison had started his paper, the Liberator, in Boston, and the Governors of Virginia and Georgia had written to the Mayor of Boston, recommending that it be suppressed. They were surprised to learn that there was no law under which this could be done. The Mayor, who had never heard of the Liberator, sought for Garrison, and told the Governors that he and his paper were not worth notice; that his office was an obscure hole and his only visible auxiliary a Negro boy.
But the subject would not down. Soon after Lucy joined the West Brookfield church, Deacon Henshaw was expelled from it for his antislavery activities. A series of church meetings was held in regard to his case. Lucy did not know that women who were church members could not vote in church meetings, and when the first vote was taken, she held up her hand with the rest. The minister, a tall, dark man, stood watching the vote. He pointed over to her, and said to the person who was counting the votes, "Don't you count her." The man asked, "Is n't she a member?" The minister answered, "Yes, but she is not a voting member." The accent of scorn in his voice touched her to the quick. Six votes were taken in the course of that meeting, and she held up her hand every time. She held it up again, with a flash in her eyes, when she recalled the incident upon her deathbed, and thought how great the change had been since the time when "that one uncounted hand" was the only visible protest against the subjection of women in church and State.
Father Stone did not approve of Lucy's wish to go on with her studies. He thought she had had quite schooling enough for a girl. She told him that if he would lend her a small sum of money, to enable her to keep on a little longer, she would then be qualified to teach; and he agreed to do so, taking her note for the amount. As she was a minor, the note was not legally valid; but she did not know that, and, if she had, she would of course have paid the debt just the same.
At sixteen she began to teach district schools at a dollar a week, "boarding around ", as was the custom. She soon became known as a successful teacher. She got larger and larger schools, until her salary reached sixteen dollars per month, which was considered very good pay for a woman.
Once she was engaged to teach the "winter term" of the school at Paxton, Massachusetts, which had been broken up by the big boys throwing the master out of the window head first into a deep snowdrift. Generally women were not thought competent to teach in the winter, because then the big boys were released from farm work and were able to attend. She soon had this difficult school in perfect order, and the big boys who had made the trouble became her most devoted lieutenants; yet she received only a fraction of the salary paid to her unsuccessful predecessor.
When Abby Kelley lectured in West Brookfield, she invited Lucy to sit in the pulpit with her. Lucy refused, partly because her hair had got all blown about on the three-mile ride from the farm to the village, and partly from a lingering traditional feeling, which she knew to be quite irrational, that the pulpit was too sacred a place for her to enter. Abby Kelley's comment was, "Oh,
