I cannot help believing that he recognized, long before I did myself,
in what direction the current of purpose in my life was setting. Now,
as I write my sketches of country life, I remember again and again the
wise things he said, and the sights he made me see. He was only
impatient with affectation and insincerity.
I may have inherited something of my father's and grandfather's
knowledge of human nature, but my father never lost a chance of trying
to teach me to observe. I owe a great deal to his patience with a
heedless little girl given far more to dreams than to accuracy, and
with perhaps too little natural sympathy for the dreams of others.
The quiet village life, the dull routine of farming or mill life,
early became interesting to me. I was taught to find everything that
an imaginative child could ask, in the simple scenes close at hand.
I say these things eagerly, because I long to impress upon every boy
and girl this truth: that it is not one's surroundings that can help
or hinder--it is having a growing purpose in one's life to make the
most of whatever is in one's reach.
If you have but a few good books, learn those to the very heart of
them. Don't for one moment believe that if you had different
surroundings and opportunities you would find the upward path any
easier to climb. One condition is like another, if you have not the
determination and the power to grow in yourself.
I was still a child when I began to write down the things I was
thinking about, but at first I always made rhymes and found prose so
difficult that a school composition was a terror to me, and I do not
remember ever writing one that was worth anything.
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