i866] Preparatory Schooling 



was finally decided that I myself should go to Castile, 

 five miles to the southeast. There a family ac- 

 quaintance was willing to board me comfortably at 

 a nominal rate, and it being reasonably near home, 

 I could walk back and forth at week-ends. 



In due season, therefore, I presented myself at 

 the Castile Academy, and was seated with an 

 excellent boy whose name I do not now recall. 

 But everything they talked about I had previously 

 been over. I was, moreover, decidedly homesick, 

 and so after two days I went back to my mother, 

 pleading that there was no use in my staying at 

 Castile, as I already knew all they were teaching 

 there ! This was indeed mainly true as far as mathe- 

 matics, science, history, and English went, but from 

 the boys themselves I might have gained much 

 knowledge of human nature, for I was then dis- 

 tinctly "green." 



My further education was now continued in an The 

 unforeseen fashion. Two young women from Femde 

 "Mount Holyoke," Miss Hardy and Miss Eldridge, ' 

 had some time before established the "Gainesville 

 Female Seminary," of which my sister Lucia was a 

 graduate. The school was naturally modeled on the 

 ideas and plans of Mary Lyon, founder of Mount 

 Holyoke and the pioneer in the higher education of 

 women. At the age of fourteen being thought a 

 youth of promise and otherwise apparently harm- 

 less I was admitted to classes with the girls, a 

 privilege also accorded at the same time to one 

 other boy, Egbert Cunningham, son of the local 

 Congregationalist minister. 



At the Seminary my studies were French, algebra, 

 geometry, and penmanship, in all of which the 



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