Читать книгу All in the Day's Work: An Autobiography онлайн

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After a month of excursions into territory unfamiliar to them I had them humbled and slowly grasping certain new ideas. I knew I was regarded with respect. It was the one conquest in the two years I spent as the Preceptress of the Poland Union Seminary of which I was proud.

Before these two years were up Mr. Lee must have realized he would never get from me the help he needed in his ambition to preserve the school as a seminary, that I would never become another Miss Blakeley. He wanted some one ambitious to make teaching a life work. I was not. Teaching was a mere stepping-stone in my plan of life, and at Poland Union Seminary it had proved a slippery stone. From the time I bounded out of bed in the morning—for in those days I did bound out of bed—until I dropped into it at an early hour, dead tired, I had no time for my microscope. It had become dusty on the table, but the passion for it and what it might reveal was still strong in me. My confidence that I could save money to continue my studies on five hundred dollars a year had proved illusory. I found myself coming out short, obliged to borrow from my father. There came to be a mutual, if unspoken, agreement between Mr. Lee and me that I should resign. Neither of us was getting what he had hoped, and so at the end of the second year, June, 1882, I gave up teaching as a stepping-stone.