Margaret Preston was very small, in explanation of which fact she told me there was a story that she had been tossed on the horns of a cow.  There was Scotch blood in the Junkin family and with it had descended the superstition that this experience dwarfs a child’s growth.  When she sat upon an ordinary chair her little feet did not touch the floor.  She had a way of smoothing the front of her dress with her hands as she talked.

Knowing her as she was then and remembering her devotion to the South and the sacrifices she had made for her home through the dark years, one might have thought that she was a native daughter of Virginia.  In the village of Milton, Pennsylvania, where her father, Reverend George Junkin, was pastor of the Associate Reformed Church, Margaret Junkin was born on the 19th of May, 1820, in a small, plain, rented house, a centre of love and harmony, with simple surroundings, for the family finances did not purchase household luxuries, but were largely expended in assisting those less fortunately placed.

In this little home, where rigid economy was practised and high aspirations reigned, our future poet entered upon the severe intellectual training which caused her at twenty-one, when the door of scholastic learning was closed upon her by the partial failure of her sight, to be called a scholar, though she sorrowfully resented the title, asking, “How can you speak of one as a scholar whose studies were cut short at twenty-one?”

She received her first instruction from her mother, passing then under the tutorship of her father, who fed his own ambition by gratifying her scholarly tastes, teaching her the Greek alphabet when she was six years old and continuing her training in collegiate subjects until she was forced by failing sight to give up her reading.

When she was ten the family removed to Germantown, where her father had charge of the Manual Labor School, and Margaret enjoyed the advantages at that time afforded by the city of Philadelphia, gathering bright memories which irradiated her somewhat sombre life then and lightened her coming years.

In Lafayette, a new college in Easton, Pennsylvania, Dr. Junkin soon found opportunity to carry on his system of training for practical and religious life and here Margaret spent sixteen happy and busy years—­happy but for the gray veil that fell between her and her loved studies before those years had passed.  She was obliged to prepare her Greek lessons at night, and the only time her father had for hearing her recitations was in the early morning before breakfast, which in that household meant in the dim candlelight of the period; not a wholesome time for perusing Greek text.  For Margaret Junkin it meant seven years of physical pain, a part of the time in a darkened room, and the lifelong regret of unavailing aspirations.  It was in Easton that she began to write in any serious and purposeful fashion, the result of her semi-blindness,