A LIFE UNVEILED BY A CHILD OF THE DRUMLINS WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY JOHN BURROUGHS GARDEN CITY   NEW YORK DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY 1922 COPYRIGHT, 1922, BY DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY ALL RIGHTS RESERVED, INCLUDING THAT OF TRANSLATION INTO FOREIGN LANGUAGES, INCLUDING THE SCANDINAVIAN PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES AT THE COUNTRY LIFE PRESS, GARDEN CITY, N. Y. First Edition...

I fancy that this “Child of the Drumlins” did not know she was living amid drumlins when she passed her youth there. She knew them only as the long, smooth, loaf-shaped hills that were scattered over her native landscape, upon which she saw cattle grazing and grain ripening, and upon which she roamed and played in the freedom of childhood. These curious-looking hills are found in certain parts of New England, and in a large section of the central and western parts of New York state. They would s

I once wandered in a beautiful garden. It had high walls which made one feel safe and sheltered. There were many flower-bordered paths, and some that were stony and rough. There were broad open spaces, dark, wooded corners, cosy nooks, and friendly trees. Openings in the wall gave glimpses that made one’s heart beat faster and that filled one with queer restless feelings, half pleasure, half pain. There came a day when I left the garden and started on a long journey. I have never been back. Some

I seem always to have lived a life apart from the obvious one, seeing the strange contrasts, the incongruities, the dramatic moments, though always these things were unexpressed. Those about me had no inkling of what was passing in my mind. Perhaps it is so with all children. One can only know one’s self, and that so vaguely. I was born near the foot of a drumlin. Their smooth level crests broke the horizon line of my native village. Amid the drumlins I shared in all the little world they bounde

Environment—what part does it play? Its stamp is upon us, but other forces and influences also determine our reactions and mould our characters. Is the objective environment alone the sea in which we swim? More significant still are the emotions which a given environment induces in each individual. To determine these it is needful to resort to our earliest memories. What were the things that so impressed us that we carry them on down through the years, an inseparable part of our inmost selves? W

Does one ever outgrow one’s early religious training? Though he outgrow his credulity, his faith, his observance of rite and ceremony, and though he wander far from the paths he followed when being trained “in the way he should go,” still must the religious influences shed round him in those early, plastic years have their permanent bearing upon his after life, even though sometimes so transformed as to be traceable only to the keen student of personality. “Back to the Old Paths” was a gospel hy

The books one reads in childhood and youth are, of course, among the most potent formative influences of those periods. My post-Mother-Goose reading consisted largely of the Child’s Bible, later the Bible itself, and the goody-good Sunday-school books, two or three of Miss Alcott’s, and whatever else I could find in my browsings. How I have cried over the Elsie books and rejoiced over the Gypsy books! Mad-cap Gypsy Breynton and pious Elsie Dinsmore were real beings to me. Sunday afternoons I wou

Serious as was my girlhood, as the sombre experiences and the resolutions which grew out of them show, it was by no means always so shadowed as this record would indicate. And it is a relief to turn from the detailed account of much of my inner life when a schoolgirl to more of the objective life, to sunnier memories, to the life within the school-house walls, even though to do so I go back for a little to the care-free days of early girlhood. In school I was a dutiful little girl of the goody-g

Belle and I decided to go to a coeducational school to study medicine, and settled upon Boston University. I was a happy girl that summer, getting ready and picturing the future. Associating Boston with Emerson, Holmes, Longfellow, and Whittier, I loved it before going there. Belle, who had studied guide-books and maps, was glib in her knowledge of the city; she knew just where the railway station was, and the college, and how to get from one to the other. Her confidence impressed me, for maps a

Our Caddie’s greeting was a pleasant surprise when we went back to College that second year. Stopping me and beaming on me, she congratulated me warmly on my anatomy paper: “Frankly, Miss Arnold, I was astonished when I learned it was your paper. You seldom did yourself justice in quizzes, it seems.” Even to this graciousness I was so constrained I could only blush and look pleased; but some years later when she visited in the city where I was practising, and I was driving out with her and anoth

There were four hospital appointments of one year each open to the seniors, each student receiving board and laundry, and giving in return his or her services, except when attending lectures. I had already declined a position as house-physician at Lasell Seminary, to which one of the retiring seniors had recommended me, hoping to secure the next hospital vacancy on January first, though letting go the bird in the hand with considerable hesitation. Either position would be a great help financiall

Much of the good fortune that has come to me has come unsought: Shortly after returning home from Boston an elderly friend of our family, an invalid who spent her winters in Florida, invited me to go there with her. In my somewhat reduced state of health the invitation was most opportune. My first glimpse of New York, as we stopped there on the way, made Boston seem small. We started for the South at night. I was a bit timid at going so far from home with the frail little old woman who had tuber