a ravine, and the sun was shining full upon it, when some one in the family called out and asked how Rhoda and Lucy came to be over in the new house, and the door open. Upon this all the rest of the family rushed to the front door, and there, across the ravine, in the open door of the new house, stood Rhoda with Lucy in her arms. Some one said, 'She must have come from the sugar camp, and has taken shelter there with Lucy from the rain.' Upon this another called out, 'Rhoda!' but she did not answer. While we were gazing and talking and calling, Rhoda herself came down-stairs, where she had left Lucy fast asleep, and stood with us while we all saw, in the full blaze of the sun, the woman with the child in her arms slowly sink, sink, sink into the ground, until she disappeared from sight. Then a great silence fell upon us all. In our hearts we all believed it to be a warning of sorrow of what, we knew not. When Rhoda and Lucy both died, then we knew. Rhoda died the next autumn, November 11; Lucy a month later, December 10, 1833. Father went directly over to the house and out into the road, but no human being, and not even a track, could be seen. Lucy has been seen many times since by different members of the family, in the same house, always in a red frock, like one she was very fond of wearing; the last time by my brother Warren's little boy, who had never heard the story. He came running in, saying that he had seen 'a little girl up-stairs, in a red dress.' He is dead now, and such a bright boy. Since the apparition in the door, never for one year has our family been free from the shadow of death. Ever since, some one of us has

been dying." ..

STRUGGLES WITH POVERTY.

19

"I don't like to think how much we are robbed of in this world by just the conditions of our life. How much better work I should have done, how much more success I might have won, if I had had a better opportunity in my youth. But for the first fourteen years of my life, it seemed as if there was actually nothing in existence but work. The whole family struggle was just for the right to live free from the curse of debt. My father worked early and late; my mother's work was never done. The mother of nine children, with no other help than that of their little hands, I shall always feel that she was taxed far beyond her strength, and died before her time. I have never felt myself to be the same that I was before Rhoda's death. Rhoda and I pined for beauty; but there was no beauty about our homely house, but that which nature gave us. We hungered and thirsted for knowledge; but there were not a dozen books on our family shelf, not a library within our reach. There was little time to study, and had there been more, there was no chance to learn but in the district school-house, down the road. I never went to any other not very much to that. It has been a long struggle. Now that I can afford to gather a few beautiful things about me, it is too late. My leisure I must spend here" (turning toward her pillow). "Do you know" (with a pathetic smile) "I seem to myself like a worn-out old ship, laid up from further use, I may be repaired a little; but I'll never be seaworthy again."

The friend, looking into her face, saw the dark eyes drowned in tears.

CHAPTER II.

EARLY STRUGGLES AND SUCCESS.

THE deaths of Rhoda and Lucy Cary were followed by the decline and passing away of their mother, who died July 30, 1835. In 1837, Robert Cary married again. His second wife was a widow, suitable in years, and childless. Had her temperament been different, her heart must have gone out in tenderness to the family of young, motherless girls toward whom she was now called to fill a mother's place. The limitations of her nature made this impossible. Such a mental and spiritual organism as theirs she could not comprehend, and with their attempted pursuits she had no sympathy. All time spent in study she considered wasted.

Alice, now seventeen, and Phoebe, thirteen, were beginning to write down in uncertain lines the spontaneous songs which seemed to sing themselves into being in their hearts and brains. A hard, uncultured, utilitarian woman, to whom work for work's sake was the ultimatum of life, could not fail to bring unhappiness to two such spirits, nor fail to sow discord in a household whose daily toil from birth had been lightened and brightened by an inborn idealism, and the unconscious presence of the very spirit of song. Ada Carnahan says: "Alice kept busily at work dur

was

EARLY EDUCATION.

21

ing the day, prosecuting her studies at night. This a fruitful source of dissension between herself and stepmother, who could not believe that burning candles for this purpose was either proper or profitable, that reading books was better than darning socks, or writing poems better than making bread. But the country girls, uncultured in mind and rustic in manners, not needing to be told the immense distance which separated them from the world of letters they longed to enter, would not be discouraged. If they must darn and bake, they would also study and write, and at last publish if candles were denied them, a saucer of lard with a bit of rag for wick could and did serve instead, and so, for ten long years, they studied and wrote and published without pecuniary recompense; often discouraged and despondent, yet never despairing; lonely and grown over-sensitive, prone to think themselves neglected and slighted, yet hugging their solitude in unconscious superiority; looking out to the graveyard on the near hillside with a regret for the past, and over and beyond it into the unknown distance with hope for the future." Phoebe, speaking of the Cary sisters as if merely acquaintances, says: "They saw but few books or newspapers. On a small

6

shelf of the cottage lay all the literary treasures of the family. These consisted of a Bible, Hymn Book, the History of the Jews,' 'Lewis and Clark's Travels,' 'Pope's Essays,' and 'Charlotte Temple,' a romance founded on fact. There might have been one or two more, now forgotten, and there was, I know, a mutilated novel by an unknown hand, called the 'Black Penitents,' the mystery of whose fate (for the closing pages of the work were gone) was a life-long regret to Alice."

Robert and Elizabeth Cary were early converts to Universalism, and the "Trumpet," says Phoebe, “read by them from the publication of its first numbers till the close of their lives, was for many years the only paper seen by Alice, and its Poet's Corner the food of her fancy, and source of her inspiration." Yet with such ill selected and scanty food for the mind, and early trained to be helpful in a household where great needs and small resources left little time for anything but the stern, practical part of life, these children began very early to see visions and to dream dreams. “At the age of fifteen Alice was left motherless, and, in one sense, companionless, her yet living sisters being too old or too young to fill the place left vacant in her life. The only sins of writing of which she seemed to have been guilty up to this time were occasional efforts to alter and improve the poetry in her school reader, and a few pages of original rhymes which broke the monotony of her copy-books. All ambition, and all love of the pursuits of life, seemed for a time to have died with her beloved sister. Her walks, which were now solitary, generally terminated at the little family burial-place, on a green hill that rose in sight of home." All these conditions and influences in her life must be considered in measuring her success, or in estimating the quality of her work. One of the severest criticisms passed on her early poems was that they were full of graves. Remembering the bereaved and lonely girl whose daily walk ended in the graveyard on the hillside, where her mother and sisters slept, how could her early song escape the shadow of death and the vibration of sorrow? With her, it was the utterance of actual loss, not the morbid sentimentalism of poetic