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442 FAMOUS LIVING AMERICANS as her imagination had failed to picture anything so lonesome, so primitive, and so isolated from everything which meant ed- ucation €uid civilization. She seemed stunned and sat by the side of the cabin with her face in her hands and did not move for hours. The children were afraid and awed and Miss Shaw says that something of life which she never regained went out of their mother from that time. When the night began to come on, the howling of the wolves and other wild animals aroused her to the sense of danger to her children. Then the mother spirit asserted itself and deadened the bitterness and loneliness and despair which had for the time overcome the woman. It was this experience which gave Miss Shaw her keen appreciation of what pioneer women suffer and enabled her later to express in her lectures such sympathy with their hardships and privations. In this primitive life the little girl grew up in freedom, working out of doors, fishing, gathering wild fruits, loving trees and animals, and with such recreations and games as came through the initiative of herself and little brother. En- counters with wild animals and Indians gave courage and op- portunity for testing the mettle of the children. Meantime a longing for knowledge was asserting itself. Some old copies of the New York Independent j with which the mother, trying to make the home neat and cosy, had papered the walls of their log cabin, fed this longing. There were political speeches in those papers, great thundering orations such as were made in those troubled days before the War, and full of history. It was a wasteful manner of learning history, perhaps, but it gave a grip on the knowledge which she has never lost. By the time Anna was fifteen years old there were suflScient people in the community to demand a school, and she passed an ex- amination which permitted her to become the teacher, at a sal- ary of two dollars a week and ** board round. As this was the first school in the township, there was no appropriation for even this small salary until it was voted to take it from the dog tax ; so the salary was not paid until after the dog tax was collected. Her gift for public speaking and her spirit of freedom be-