My step-mother was a good woman, and meant to do her duty by me.  Nay, she was more than that:  she was, as far as her poor light went, a Christian.  She had experienced religion in the great revival of 18—­, which was felt all through Western Kentucky, under the preaching of the Reverend Peleg Dawson, and when she married my father and went to bury herself in the wilds of “Up Sandy” was a shining light in the Methodist church, a class-leader who had had and had told experiences.

But all that glory was over now; it had flashed its little day:  for there is a glow in the excitement of our religious revivals as potent in its effect on the imaginations of women and young men as ever were the fastings and penances which brought the dreams and reveries, the holy visions and the glorious revealings, of the Catholic votaries.  In this short, triumphant time of spiritual pride lay the whole romance of my step-mother’s life.  Perhaps it was well for her soul that she was taken from the scene of her triumphs and brought again to the hard realities of life.  The self-exaltation, the ungodly pride passed away; but there was left the earnest, prayerful desire to do her duty in her way and calling, and the first path of duty which opened to her zeal was that which led to the care of a motherless child, the saving of an immortal soul.  And in all sincerity and uprightness did she strive to walk in it.  But what woman of five-and-thirty, who has outlived her youth and womanly tenderness in the loneliness and hardening influences of a single life, and who marries at last for a shelter in old age, knows the wants of a little child?  Indeed, what but a mother’s love has the long-enduring patience to support the never ceasing calls for forbearance and perseverance which a child makes upon a grown person?  Those little ones need the nourishment of love and praise, but such milk for babes can come only from a mother’s breast.  I got none of it.  On the contrary, my dearly loved independence, my wild-wood life, where Nature had become to me my nursing-mother, was exchanged for one of never ceasing supervision.  “Little girls must learn to be useful,” was the phrase that greeted my unwilling ears fifty times a day, which pursued me through my daily round of dish-washings, floor-sweepings, bed-making and potato-peeling, to overtake me at last in the very moment when I hoped to reap the reward of my diligence in a free afternoon by the river-side in the crotch of the water-maple that hung over the stream, clutching me and fastening me down to the hated square of patchwork, which bore, in the spots of red that defaced its white purity in following the line of my stitches, the marks of the wounds that my awkward hands inflicted on themselves with their tiny weapon.