FROM my earliest recollections, and up to the ripe age of fifty-three, I had been an active and diligent¹ worker in the world. This sounds absurd; but having almost no toys except such as I could manufacture, my first plays were but the outdoor work of active men and women on a small scale. Born with an inveterate² opposition³ to staying in the house, I very early learned to use a carpenter’s kit⁴ and a gardener’s tools, and followed in my mimic⁵ way the occupations of the poulterer and the farmer, working my little field with a wooden plow⁶ of my own making, and felling saplings 10with an ax rigged up from the old iron of the wagon-shop. Living in the country, far from the artificial restraints and conventions by which most girls are hedged from the activities that would develop a good physique, and endowed with the companionship of a mother who let me have my own sweet will, I “ran wild” until my sixteenth birthday, when the hampering⁷ long skirts were brought, with their accompanying corset and high heels; my hair was clubbed up with pins, and I remember writing in my journal, in the first heartbreak of a young human colt taken from its pleasant pasture, “Altogether, I recognize that my occupation is gone.”