A New England Girlhood, Outlined from Memory (Beverly, MA)

Very vivid, too, is the recollection of the exquisite little prose idyl of "Moss-Side," from "Lights and Shadows of Scottish Life." From the few short words with which it began--"Gilbert Ainslee was a poor man, and he had been a poor man all the days of his life"--to the happy waking of his little daughter Margaret out of her fever-sleep with which it ended, it was one sweet picture of lowly life and honorable poverty irradiated with sacred home-affections, and cheerful in its rustic homeliness as the blossoms and wild birds of the moorland and the magic touch of Christopher North could make it. I thought as I read-- "How much pleasanter it must be to be poor than to be rich--at least in Scotland!" For I was beginning to be made aware that poverty was a possible visitation to our own household; and that, in our Cape Ann corner of Massachusetts, we might find it neither comfortable nor picturesque. After my father's death, our way of living, never luxurious, grew more and more frugal. Now and then I heard mysterious allusions to "the wolf at the door": and it was whispered that, to escape him, we might all have to turn our backs upon the home where we were born, and find our safety in the busy world, working among strangers for our daily bread. Before I had reached my tenth year I began to have rather disturbed dreams of what it might soon mean for me to "earn my own living."