but to have this costume multiplied by three was indeed monotonous.  I had such an aversion to that color that I used to rebel regularly at the beginning of each season when new dresses were purchased, until we finally passed into an exquisite shade of blue.  No words could do justice to my dislike of those red dresses.  My grandfather’s detestation of the British redcoats must have descended to me.  My childhood’s antipathy to wearing red enabled me later to comprehend the feelings of a little niece, who hated everything pea green, because she had once heard the saying, “neat but not gaudy, as the devil said when he painted his tail pea green.”  So when a friend brought her a cravat of that color she threw it on the floor and burst into tears, saying, “I could not wear that, for it is the color of the devil’s tail.”  I sympathized with the child and had it changed for the hue she liked.  Although we cannot always understand the ground for children’s preferences, it is often well to heed them.

I am told that I was pensively looking out of the nursery window one day, when Mary Dunn, the Scotch nurse, who was something of a philosopher, and a stern Presbyterian, said:  “Child, what are you thinking about; are you planning some new form of mischief?” “No, Mary,” I replied, “I was wondering why it was that everything we like to do is a sin, and that everything we dislike is commanded by God or someone on earth.  I am so tired of that everlasting no! no! no!  At school, at home, everywhere it is no!  Even at church all the commandments begin ’Thou shalt not.’  I suppose God will say ‘no’ to all we like in the next world, just as you do here.”  Mary was dreadfully shocked at my dissatisfaction with the things of time and prospective eternity, and exhorted me to cultivate the virtues of obedience and humility.

I well remember the despair I felt in those years, as I took in the whole situation, over the constant cribbing and crippling of a child’s life.  I suppose I found fit language in which to express my thoughts, for Mary Dunn told me, years after, how our discussion roused my sister Margaret, who was an attentive listener.  I must have set forth our wrongs in clear, unmistakable terms; for Margaret exclaimed one day, “I tell you what to do.  Hereafter let us act as we choose, without asking.”  “Then,” said I, “we shall be punished.”  “Suppose we are,” said she, “we shall have had our fun at any rate, and that is better than to mind the everlasting ‘no’ and not have any fun at all.”  Her logic seemed unanswerable, so together we gradually acted on her suggestions.  Having less imagination than I, she took a common-sense view of life and suffered nothing from anticipation of troubles, while my sorrows were intensified fourfold by innumerable apprehensions of possible exigencies.

Our nursery, a large room over a back building, had three barred windows reaching nearly to the floor.  Two of these opened on a gently slanting roof over a veranda.  In our night robes, on warm summer evenings we could, by dint of skillful twisting and compressing, get out between the bars, and there, snugly braced against the house, we would sit and enjoy the moon and stars and what sounds might reach us from the streets, while the nurse, gossiping at the back door, imagined we were safely asleep.