Medford Historical Society Papers, Volume 2.

Soon after going to Norridgewock, when she was fifteen years old, she wrote to her brother Converse:

‘I have been busily engaged in reading Paradise lost. Homer hurried me along with rapid impetuosity; every passion that he portrayed, I felt. I loved, hated, and resented, just as he inspired me. But when I read Milton I felt elevated above this diurnal sphere. I could but admire such astonishing grandeur of description, such heavenly sublimity of style.’

One cannot help wondering how many girls of fifteen at the present time read Homer and Milton with such understanding, or express their appreciation so eloquently. In a letter three months later she wrote: ‘Much as I admire Milton, I must confess that Homer is a greater favorite with me.’

Two years after, when she was seventeen, she gave the following account of her reading to her brother:

‘I usually spend an hour after I retire for the night in reading Gibbon's Roman Empire. I have likewise been reading Shakespeare, and I have been looking over the Spectator. I do not think Addison so good a writer as Johnson, though a more polished one. Indeed, Johnson is my favorite among all his contemporaries.’

While this remarkable selection of books for daily reading gives us insight into Maria's intellectual growth and training, we have evidence also of the way in which her sister, Mrs. Preston, attended to the development of her domestic accomplishments, in a piece of her handiwork lately presented to the Medford Historical Society,—an infant's gown, of quaintest pattern, embroidered in an elaborate pattern, with seams, gathers, and hems exquisitely sewed, all the work of her own hands, while she was in her teens. She was also taught to take part in the daily duties of her sister's household, as became a young lady of that primitive time.

Meantime, during these few years that she spent in Maine, her father had removed from Medford to Dorchester, and her brother Converse had been settled over