Lives of Girls Who Became Famous | Page 3

first Harriet,
with a not unnatural feeling of injury, said to her: "Because you have
come and married my father, when I am big enough, I mean to go and
marry your father;" but she afterwards learned to love her very much.
At seven, with a remarkably retentive memory,--a thing which many of
us spoil by trashy reading, or allowing our time and attention to be
distracted by the trifles of every-day life,--Harriet had learned
twenty-seven hymns and two long chapters of the Bible. She was
exceedingly fond of reading, but there was little in a poor minister's
library to attract a child. She found Bell's Sermons, and _Toplady on
Predestination_. "Then," she says, "there was a side closet full of
documents, a weltering ocean of pamphlets, in which I dug and toiled
for hours, to be repaid by disinterring a delicious morsel of a _Don
Quixote_, that had once been a book, but was now lying in forty or fifty
dissecta membra, amid Calls, Appeals, Essays, Reviews, and
Rejoinders. The turning up of such a fragment seemed like the rising of
an enchanted island out of an ocean of mud." Finally Ivanhoe was
obtained, and she and her brother George read it through seven times.

At twelve, we find her in the school of Mr. John P. Brace, a
well-known teacher, where she developed great fondness for
composition. At the exhibition at the close of the year, it was the
custom for all the parents to come and listen to the wonderful
productions of their children. From the list of subjects given, Harriet
had chosen, "Can the Immortality of the Soul be proved by the Light of
Nature?"
"When mine was read," she says, "I noticed that father brightened and
looked interested. 'Who wrote that composition?' he asked of Mr. Brace.
'Your daughter, sir!' was the answer. There was no mistaking father's
face when he was pleased, and to have interested him was past all
juvenile triumphs."
A new life was now to open to Harriet. Her only sister Catharine, a
brilliant and noble girl, was engaged to Professor Fisher of Yale
College. They were to be married on his return from a European tour,
but alas! the Albion, on which he sailed, went to pieces on the rocks,
and all on board, save one, perished. Her betrothed was never heard
from. For months all hope seemed to go out of Catharine's life, and
then, with a strong will, she took up a course of mathematical study, his
favorite study, and Latin under her brother Edward. She was now
twenty-three. Life was not to be along the pleasant paths she had hoped,
but she must make it tell for the future.
With remarkable energy, she went to Hartford, Conn., where her
brother was teaching, and thoroughly impressed with the belief that
God had a work for her to do for girls, she raised several thousand
dollars and built the Hartford Female Seminary. Her brothers had
college doors opened to them; why, she reasoned, should not women
have equal opportunities? Society wondered of what possible use Latin
and moral philosophy could be to girls, but they admired Miss Beecher,
and let her do as she pleased. Students poured in, and the seminary
soon overflowed. My own school life in that beloved institution, years
afterward, I shall never forget.
And now the little twelve-year-old Harriet came down from Litchfield
to attend Catharine's school, and soon become a pupil-teacher, that the

burden of support might not fall too heavily upon the father. Other
children had come into the Beecher home, and with a salary of eight
hundred dollars, poverty could not be other than a constant attendant.
Once when the family were greatly straitened for money, while Henry
and Charles were in college, the new mother went to bed weeping, but
the father said, "Well, the Lord always has taken care of me, and I am
sure He always will," and was soon fast asleep. The next morning,
Sunday, a letter was handed in at the door, containing a $100 bill, and
no name. It was a thank-offering for the conversion of a child.
Mr. Beecher, with all his poverty, could not help being generous. His
wife, by close economy, had saved twenty-five dollars to buy a new
overcoat for him. Handing him the roll of bills, he started out to
purchase the garment, but stopped on the way to attend a missionary
meeting. His heart warmed as he stayed, and when the contribution-box
was passed, he put in the roll of bills for the Sandwich Islanders, and
went home with his threadbare coat!
Three years later, Mr. Beecher, who had now become widely known as
a revivalist and brilliant preacher, was called to Boston, where he
remained for six years. His six sermons