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FROM New Hampshire Alice Brown responded, July 29, 1918, to a request for something from herself about herself with a letter as follows:

“I have been too busy in legitimate ways—gardening, cooking, cursing the Hun—to write you a human document. But these are some of the dark facts. I was born in Hampton Falls, New Hampshire, about six miles inland from the sea, near enough to get a tang of salt and a ‘sea turn’ of walking—[a word that looks like ‘mist’ or ‘twist’.] The country there is slightly rolling, with hills enough to give nice little dips and climbs in the winding roads, and the farms are fertile. My people were farmers. We lived, not at Hampton Falls village, but in a little ‘neighborhood’ on the road to Exeter, and at Exeter all the shopping was done. It was one postoffice, and any neighbor who drove over brought back the mail for the rest.

“I went to the little district school until I was perhaps fourteen and then went to the ‘Robinson Female Seminary,’ Exeter, walking back and forth every day except in the winter months, and there I was graduated—after which I taught several years, in the country and in Boston, hating it more and more every minute, and then threw over my certainty to write.