These were enchanting days for the enthusiastic girl with brown curls and blue eyes.  She roamed over the meadows, and through the forests, gathering wild flowers in the spring or nuts in the fall, being educated, as she afterwards said, “first and foremost by Nature, wonderful, beautiful, ever-changing as she is in that cloudland, Litchfield.  There were the crisp apples of the pink azalea,—­honeysuckle-apples, we called them; there were scarlet wintergreen berries; there were pink shell blossoms of trailing arbutus, and feathers of ground pine; there were blue and white and yellow violets, and crowsfoot, and bloodroot, and wild anemone, and other quaint forest treasures.”

A single incident, told by herself in later years, will show the frolic-loving spirit of the girl, and the gentleness of Roxana Beecher.  “Mother was an enthusiastic horticulturist in all the small ways that limited means allowed.  Her brother John, in New York, had just sent her a small parcel of fine tulip-bulbs.  I remember rummaging these out of an obscure corner of the nursery one day when she was gone out, and being strongly seized with the idea that they were good to eat, and using all the little English I then possessed to persuade my brothers that these were onions, such as grown people ate, and would be very nice for us.  So we fell to and devoured the whole; and I recollect being somewhat disappointed in the odd, sweetish taste, and thinking that onions were not as nice as I had supposed.  Then mother’s serene face appeared at the nursery door, and we all ran toward her, and with one voice began to tell our discovery and achievement.  We had found this bag of onions, and had eaten them all up.

“There was not even a momentary expression of impatience, but she sat down and said, ’My dear children, what you have done makes mamma very sorry; those were not onion roots, but roots of beautiful flowers; and if you had let them alone, ma would have had next summer in the garden, great, beautiful red and yellow flowers, such as you never saw.’  I remember how drooping and disappointed we all grew at this picture, and how sadly we regarded the empty paper bag.”

When Harriet was five years old, a deep shadow fell upon the happy household.  Eight little children were gathered round the bedside of the dying mother.  When they cried and sobbed, she told them, with inexpressible sweetness, that “God could do more for them than she had ever done or could do, and that they must trust Him,” and urged her six sons to become ministers of the Gospel.  When her heart-broken husband repeated to her the verse, “You are now come unto Mount Zion, unto the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem, and to an innumerable company of angels; to the general assembly and church of the first-born, which are written in heaven, and to God the Judge of all, and to the spirits of just men made perfect, and to Jesus the Mediator of the New Covenant,” she looked up into his face with a beautiful smile, and closed her eyes forever.  That smile Mr. Beecher never forgot to his dying day.