Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Olde Cambridge

[25] office, and was told by my elder brother that these instructors were considered to be partly paid in honor-this being certainly a high lesson to impress on schoolboys.

It must finally be remembered that an essential part of the atmosphere of Old Cambridge was what may be called the habit of precocity on the intellectual side. The period described was one of infant schools,--institutions quite unlike the modern kindergarten,--and the forcing process was applied very early, so as insensibly to modify us all. Margaret Fuller began to study Latin at the age of six, and recited to her father after he had come back from his lawyer's office, being often kept up for the purpose until late in the evening. The Rev. Dr. Hedge, afterwards so intimately associated with her, assured me that there was nothing remarkable about this process of forcing except that it was applied to a girl; all the professors' sons, he said, were educated in the same way. He himself was fitted for college at eleven, and had read at least half of the whole body of Latin literature before that time. I have given elsewhere a letter I once received from a little girl