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felt the spell of enthusiasm and always sought her stories.

Among her editorials, the witty little preacher, "Jack in the Pulpit," held his audience spell-bound. Many were her rhymes and jingles, and among her pleasing tales" Donald and Dorothy " and " Pluck."

Through personal friendship with noted authors, she secured from them many contributions, and even fascinating "Lord Fauntleroy" made his first bow to the public as a serial in "St. Nicholas."

For older people, Mrs. Dodge wrote poems and prose tales; among the latter was "Theophilus and Others," and among the "Others " was amusing Mrs. Maloney on the Chinese Question."

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Mrs. Dodge was constantly sought by her coterie of special friends, and one evening every week she was the genial hostess in her New York home, overlooking Central Park. And Onteora cast its spell over her as over many professional men and women, and it was here in her rustic home that she died; and this "lover of little ones up to the end " was mourned by children to whom she has left a memorial of farreaching influence, even the juvenile classic which she sent forth touched with the finest thought and fancy of her day; and Richard Watson Gilder wrote:

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Many the laurels her bright spirit won;

Now that through tears we read 'The End,'

The brightest leaf of all

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Is this: She was the children's friend.'"

XXXII

WOMAN IN AMERICAN LITERATURE

PART SECOND

IN 1880, there appeared in "St. Nicholas," a story headed "The Naughtiest Day of My Life." This was a confession written by Helen Fiske Hunt Jackson (1831-1884), describing an escapade as a child when with another little girl she ran away from her home in Amherst, Massachusetts, to Hadley, four miles distant. The whole village of Amherst, even to college professors, joined in the search, and late at night the children were brought back; and in merry, impulsive mood, Helen walked in exclaiming: "Oh, mother, I've had a perfectly splendid time!" This is a most characteristic anecdote of the childhood of brilliant, impetuous Helen Fiske, daughter of Professor Fiske of Amherst College.

She was married at twenty-one to Captain Hunt of the army, and with her social and winning nature, enjoyed the wandering life of a military household; later her husband, now Major Hunt, was killed in Brooklyn, while experimenting with an invention of his own for firing projectiles under water.

Two

years more, and her handsome, precocious son Bennie died of diphtheria, and before he passed away, he made his mother promise not to take her life. Stunned by the blows that had followed in swift succession, Mrs. Hunt for a time shut herself away from the world, and finally her solace came in the form of literature.

In her home in Newport, Rhode Island, she studied rhetoric and literary methods and gradually acquired careful construction. After years, her poems began to be admired. These are on Nature, home-life, and abstract themes. They are meditative rather than joycus, and in their glow and intensity rank very high. Emerson considered them the best of those written by American women, and used to carry them in his pocket to read to his friends.

How expressive of her colour-sense and delicate ear for melody are her lines:

Chestnuts, clicking one by one,

Escape from satin burrs; her fringes done,
The gentian spreads them out in sunny days;

The summer charily her reds doth lay

Like jewels in her costilest array;

October, scornful, burns them on a bier."

And perhaps the sorrow that clouded her own life found expression in "The Spinner," from which we take extract:

"Like a blind spinner in the sun,
I tread my days;

I know that all the thread will run

Appointed ways;

I know each day will bring its task
And being blind, no more I ask.

But listen, listen, day by day,
To hear their tread
Who bear the finished web away,

And cut the thread,

And bring God's message in the sun,
'Thou, poor, blind spinner, work is done.'"

Of restless and adventurous temperament, Mrs. Hunt travelled much on the Continent. In her "Bits of Travel," she immortalised a German landlady; and while the latter did not enjoy having her love-story given to the world, she called the writer who had sojourned with her "the kindest lady in the world."

"Bits of Talk" followed " Bits of Travel," and these with other things signed with the pen-name "H. H." had very many readers, doubtless because the author's personality was so wrought into every word.

"H. H." had early asserted that she would never be a woman with "a hobby"; but after listening to lectures in Boston and New York on the wrongs of the Indians, her soul was stirred to its depths and

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from this time she consecrated her life to a single purpose she would emancipate the Indian Harriet Beecher Stowe had emancipated the negro. She travelled over the West, carrying cheer to them in their adobe villages as she listened to their tales and pledged herself to do what she could, and they many times saluted her as "Queen."

To make her facts accurate, she spent three months working in the Astor Library, New York, and then published her "Century of Dishonour." At her own expense, she sent a copy to every member of Congress. The work exhausted her, she went to Norway for refreshment; and on her return received an appointment from the President to investigate the needs of the Indian. Again she searched into her problem and her report was clear and vigorous.

She was interested, also, in early Spanish Missions, and these were told of in magazine articles. In 1884, Ramona," her best novel, came out. It is a powerful work, its moral revealing her interest in the red man, and it has now, in 1913, reached its ninety-third printing!

After years of strenuous labour, her health was failing, and she removed to the West. She married a Mr. Jackson, a Quaker, and a banker of Colorado Springs, and here she made a beautiful home and ten years of life remained. Here she cherished her human friendships, and her love for flowers which she gathered by the carriageful from "her garden

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