66 Aunt says I have been a very good girl today about my work, however I think this days work may be called a piece meal, for in the first place I sewed on the bosom of unkles shirt, mended two pair of gloves, mended for the wash two handkerchiefs (one cambrick), sewed on half a border of a lawn apron of aunts, read part of the xxist Chapter of Exodus and a story in the Mothers Gift."

Physical pain or disability was no excuse for slothfulness or idleness in the young in provincial days. Anna was not always well, had heavy colds, was feverish; but, well or ill, she was never unemployed. Even with painful local afflictions she still was industrious.

am

"I am disabled by a whitloe on my fourth finger & something like one on my middle finger. But altho' my right hand is in bondage, my left is free. And my Aunt says it will be a nice opportunity if I do but improve it to perfect myself in learning to spin flax. I ar pleas'd with the proposal, and am at this present exerting myself for this purpose. I hope when two or at most three months are past to give you occular demonstration of my proficiency in this art as well as several others. My fingers are not the only part of me that has suffered with sores within this fortnight, for I have had an ugly great boil upon my right hip & about a dozen small ones. I am at present swathed hip & thigh as Samson smote the Philistines, but my soreness is near over. My aunt thought it highly proper to give me some cooling physick, so last Tuesday I took Globe salt (a disagreeable potion), & kept chamber. Since which there has been no new erruption."

oz.

We find her ere the "bandage is off the fingure" knitting and writing and sewing, improving every moment.

stant references to criticisms from aunt

Deming appear throughout the little book, criticisms of the form of expression, of the penmanship, and of the spelling, though I find her orthography better than that of most grown persons of her day.

"Aunt hopes a little fals English will not spoil the whole with Mamma."

"Aunt Dont approve my English, and has not the fear you will think her concerned in the Diction."

"Last Wednessday - you taught me to spell the 4 day of the week, but Aunt says it should be spelt Wednesday."

"It is a grief to Aunt that I dont always write as well as I can, I can write pretily."

She was a friendly little soul, eager to be loved; resenting deeply that her aunt Storer let "either one of her chaises, chariot, or babyhutt" (booby hutch) pass her door every day without sending for her to visit, as she would "if she had wanted much to have seen me;" visiting her cousins, the wealthy Barrels, and going cheerfully tea-drinking from house to house of her friends. And she was merry, too, full of life and wit: jesting about getting a "fresh seasoning with Globe salt; " calling the minister's jour nal his "I & Aunt &c.," in laughing reference to her own I-and-aunt-filled pages; and after she had made herself a dozen new shifts, writing to her mother in high spirits:

"By the way, I must inform you (pray dont let papa see this) that yesterday I

to grow up.1 I like to think of her as always a loving, endearing little child; not so passionate and gifted and rare a creature as that star among children, Marjorie Fleming, but a natural and homely little flower of New England life. For if she lived she may have had her heart-strings torn by loss of lover in the war of the Revolution, or she may have grown old and feeble and dull and sad; but now she lives in the glamour of eternal, laughing, happy youth through the few pages of her little time-stained journal.

Alice Morse Earle.

A LITTLE more than a year ago, there passed away in Cambridge, England, in the fullness of an honored age, a woman who, in popular speech, was a leader of a cause, the cause of the higher education of women. There was, however, so complete an absence from her personality of aught that could suggest a departure from the most time-honored type of womanhood that it is only when reviewing and defining her life work that one would think of designating her thus. Then, even, one hesitates to include in the category to which also belong the noisy agitator and aggressive claimant of female rights the dignified and gentle lady who for nearly twenty years presided over Newnham Hall and College. Yet, in any attempt to give a true impression of Miss Clough, it must needs be said in clearest terms that she was above all things a reformer. Her life was passed in an earnest and untiring effort to bring a new order into the intellectual lives of other and younger women. Throughout a long and unbroken series of years her patience and

1 Perhaps it serves even better to preserve this idea of youthfulness to know that the young

courage in the service of her sex were never known to flag. Like too many of her fellow-workers, she may have brought away some ineradicable scars from the ungracious struggle with hostile conservative forces; but in her case there were none that could mar the softness and serenity of her presence. She bore about her, indeed, most of the marks and tokens that, to the student of types of character, indicate a conservative temperament. Her movements were slow (too early made more so by feebleness of health); her voice was low, though forcible; her speech deliberate. There was that in the atmosphere she created around her that sufficed to impart homelikeness to the bare and crude college halls, as yet unenriched by associations of a past.

The college owns two portraits of her one hangs over the "high" table in Clough Hall; the other, by Richmond, is in Old Hall. The latter is the earlier taken, and the least characteristic; yet the artist has presented vividly what must have first impressed those who met her,

the fire and glow of her large dark girl died when she was about nineteen years of age.ED. ATLANTIC MONTHLY.

cap.

eyes. There are eyes, met with perhaps half a dozen times in a lifetime, that, once seen, are never forgotten. Miss Clough's were of this kind. Their unusual size and darkness were made still more marked by the silvery whiteness of the hair above. This soft, lovely hair was parted in bands over the forehead and folded beneath a lace away It is not too fanciful to say that the contrast between the keenness of the dusky eyes and the softness of the white hair typified outwardly the contrasts to be found in Miss Clough's character and traits. Although she stood before the world at large as the representative of a newly recognized principle, it is more than doubtful if she could at any time have succeeded in holding the attention of an audience, or even so much as in making her voice heard from a public platform. The head of one of the two most important organized bodies of women in the kingdom, it would have been impossible to picture her as presiding actively over any numerous organized assembly; one no more formida ble, even, than the Debating Society or House of Commons of her own college students. With those valiant and admirable women whose vocation it is to disseminate doctrine in conferences and councils, and to spread the catchwords of a new movement, she seemed, indeed, to have nothing in common; yet of the number of persons of all sorts and conditions who were brought into personal contact with her, none, it is safe to say, were ever misled into doubting her single-minded devotion to an impersonal cause, a devotion carried, as her friends knew, to the length of refusing to appropriate to individual use as much of the limited space of the college as they deemed her health required.

No practical detail that concerned the college or the students was too insignificant to engage Miss Clough's attention. Curiously blended with this almost anxious care for small matters was an absence VOL. LXXII. NO. 430. 15

of mind that now and then lent an air of abstraction to what she might be saying or doing. Then, when one least expected it, came the swift flash of insight into character, the evidence of the shrewd instinct for business. instinct for business. Advancing years brought with them a number of small personal idiosyncrasies, well remembered by friends, — all kindly and unselfish in nature, of the sort to bring a tender, involuntary smile to the lips of those who now recall them. The earnestness of her disposition was delightfully tempered by a sense of humor; not the humor that sparkles or leaps out in witticism, but the quieter kind that finds its adequate expression in a gentle curve of the lips, a momentary flash of the eye. Joined with this, and no doubt in a measure due to it, was the sense of proportion so noticeable in her ideas in regard to her work. From the tendency, so conspicuous in many members of her sex, to exaggerate, to overestimate the relative importance of a new departure, Miss Clough was singularly free. Something of this rare appreciation of the relativity of things she doubtless owed to the circumstances and the sphere of her activity. Her college was not a pioneer institution, built where before only the growths of nature had flourished, but a follower and an imitator, a recipient of favors at first somewhat niggardly bestowed, it must be confessed at the hands of an august and immeasurably venerable benefactor. The mere external contrast between the modest red brick architecture of the halls, Old, Sidgwick, and Clough, that compose the new college and the splendid gateways and façades, the chapels, quadrangles, and gardens, the whole inexhaustible wealth of beauty of the old university, would seem sufficient in itself to impart a fit measure of humility to an aspiring feminine don. That it was innately natural, however, to Miss Clough to reverence the traditions of the past while zealously striving to promote the welfare of the future, the

record of her active but quiet life can prove.

She was born in Liverpool, in 1820, only a year after the birth of her more rarely gifted brother, Arthur Hugh. But the ugly commercial city, which offers to so many transatlantic descendants the first repellent glimpse of the mother country, was not the home that was hers by birthright. The Cloughs were Welsh. For many generations they had lived at "Plas Clough," in Denbighshire, the most northeasterly county of the land of the ancient bards. Miss Clough's father, James Butler Clough, was the first of the family to emigrate from the vicinity of the old home. He established himself, at the outset, in the great importing mart as a cotton merchant; but when his only daughter, on whom had been bestowed the homely Christian names of Anne Jemima, was three years old, he embarked on a longer voyage than the passage of the Dee or Mersey, and came to Charleston, in this country. Here his daughter spent the next thirteen years of her life, living perhaps more merrily, and certainly with greater freedom from outward restraint, than she could have done in the northern

English home. In the memoir written by her, in after years, for an edition of her brother's poetical works, she gives pleasant glimpses of playtimes among the cotton heaps in their father's office, near the wharves, and of still more delightful summer holidays on Sullivan Island, where there was paddling on the warm sands, with happy shelter among the myrtle groves, and where strange, fascinating birds haunted the lonely shore.

But the moulding influence of her early life was her mother. Mrs. Clough, whose charmingly quaint maiden name. was Anne Perfect, was of Yorkshire birth, and was a mother to whom her children owed more than the gift of physical existence. Her daughter's own words can best describe her. "My mother," Miss

Clough writes, "cared little for general society, but had a few fast friends to whom she was strongly attached. In her tastes and habits she was rigidly simple: this harmonized with the stern integrity which was the foundation of her character. She was very fond of reading, especially works on religious subjects, poetry, and history; and she greatly enjoyed beautiful scenery, and visiting places which had any historical associations. She loved what was grand, noble, and enterprising, and was truly religious. She early taught us about God and duty, and, having such a loving earthly father, it was not difficult to look up to a Heavenly one. . . . But with all this love of the terrible and grand she was altogether a woman, clinging to and leaning on our father.”

When Miss Clough was sixteen the family returned to Liverpool, and there the next fourteen years of her life were passed. Her attractive and venturesome father died in 1843, leaving her to be thenceforth the companion and protector of her mother. Before this time, she had begun, in a small and tentative way, the less personal work which was to last as long as her life. As far as her own needs were concerned, the only existing means of supplementing her irregular and unsystematic education were such lessons as she could get from private

masters.

But then, as now, there was plentiful demand for help in the education of others, and she began to teach in a school for Welsh children. Not satisfied with the school curriculum of those days of unscientific pedagogy, she had the children in her own home, on Saturdays or in the evenings, and there taught them, among other subjects, the neglected one of geography. In a magazine article on better methods of teaching reading she embodied her educational theories, showing, youthful as she was, a thorough practical insight into the elementary school system that then existed. In 1850, Liverpool was, on account

of Mrs. Clough's health, exchanged for Ambleside. There, in the heart of the beautiful lake scenery, and among the stimulating associations of Windermere and its neighboring hills, Miss Clough went on with her work. High up on the "how," or fell, above the village, in a small house dignified by the name of "Eller How," she opened a school for the children of the place. The school was for boys and girls alike; and it is interesting to know that Miss Clough continued always to approve this plan. There were other features peculiar to her school which, though equally in touch with modern sentiment, could not be carried out in larger places so thoroughly as in the little hillside academy. Thus, each child had its own time-table, suited to its individual needs, and drawn up in the careful mistress's own way. Unnecessary restraint was banished, and lessons might be learned in window seats or corners, in postures of delicious comfort. It is pleasant to think how the small inhabitants of Wordsworth's countryside must have delighted in a schoolmistress who, beside having marvelous stores of information which she loved to pour out to eager listeners, was also known on occasion to inquire, "with admirable gravity and conviction, after the health of certain dolls who were supposed to be suffering from a severe attack of scarlet fever." An appreciative pupil, now known to fame as Mrs. Humphry Ward, remembers that even as a little child she was impressed by "the mixture of patience, common sense, and occasional humor with which she treated my troublesome temper."

After ten years of life at Ambleside, Miss Clough lost the mother she had tenderly cared for, amid her other occupations, and one year later her brother, the poet, Arthur Hugh, died in Florence. With his loss, in 1861, the period of her active teaching came to an end. For the ten succeeding years her home was with his widow and children at Combe

Hurst, near Kingston-on-Thames. It was during this time that broader fields of usefulness opened before her; the history of her life is henceforth one with the history of the progress of the higher education of women in England. The first important step actually taken in this far-reaching movement was suggested by her in an article published in Macmillan's Magazine, advocating the establishment in the large provincial towns of courses of lectures for the "elder girls from the various schools," and for teachers who "desired to improve themselves." This scheme, which was to be "by way of experiment, as a means of creating a taste for higher studies and collective instruction," was embodied by the formation, in 1867, of the "North of England Council for Promoting the Higher Education of Women." Liverpool, Manchester, Leeds, and Sheffield were the four towns represented in the Council, which had for its president Mrs. Butler, wife of the Principal of Liverpool College, with Miss Clough as secretary.

In October and November of this same year, the Council provided its first course of lectures, the forerunner of the University Extension courses. Astronomy was the somewhat ambitious subject of the course, which was repeated in each of the four towns in succession by Professor (then Mr.) Stuart, of Trinity College, Cambridge. It is needless to say, in the light of succeeding events, that this and the other courses quickly following proved, by their popularity, that the Council had taken at the flood a tide that was to lead to great developments. The next step in advance was but the logical outcome of the first. This was the presentation by the Council to the University of Cambridge of a numerously signed petition for the establishment of an examination for women over eighteen. The immediate result of this petition was the holding in June, 1869, of the first of the long se