Her first quarterly examination, to be held in the presence of principal, trustees and parents, is a cause of great anxiety.  She writes that her nerves were on fire and the blood was ready to burst from her face, and she slept none the night previous.  She wore a new muslin gown, plaid in purple, white, blue and brown, two puffs around the skirt and on the sleeves at shoulders and wrists, white linen undersleeves and collarette; new blue prunella gaiters with patent-leather heels and tips; her cousin’s watch with a gold chain and pencil.  Her abundant hair was braided in four long braids, which cousin Margaret sewed together and wound around a big shell comb.  Everybody said, “The schoolmarm looks beautiful,” and “many fears were expressed lest some one should be so smitten that the school would be deprived of a teacher.”  The pupils acquitted themselves with flying colors, and the teacher then went to spend her vacation with her married sisters at Easton and Battenville.  They had “long talks and good laughs and cries together,” but she writes her parents that if they will make one visit to this old home they will go back to Rochester thoroughly satisfied with the new one.

[Illustration: 

  Susan B. Anthony. 
  At the age of 28, from A daguerreotype.]

For the winter she buys a broche shawl for $22.50, a gray fox muff for $8, a $5.50 white ribbed-silk hat, “which makes the villagers stare,” and a plum-colored merino dress at $2 a yard, “which everybody admits to be the sweetest thing entirely;” and she wonders if her sisters “do not feel rather sad because they are married and can not have nice clothes.”  Miss Anthony may be said to have been at this time at the height of her fashionable career.

In the spring her pupils give an “exhibition” which far surpasses anything ever before seen in Canajoharie.  She writes:  “Can you begin to imagine my excitement?  The nights seemed lengthened into days; the hopes, the fears that filled my mind are indescribable.  Who ever thought that Susan Anthony could get up such an affair?  I am sure I never did, but here I was; it was sink or swim, I made a bold effort and won the victory."[10]

In June she attends her first circus, “Sands, Lent & Co., Proprietors.”  About this time she writes of being invited to a military ball and says:  “My fancy for attending dances is fully satiated.  I certainly shall not attend another unless I can have a total abstinence man to accompany me, and not one whose highest delight is to make a fool of himself.”  She says in this letter:  “The town election has just been held and the good people elected a distiller for supervisor and a rumseller for justice of the peace.”