Life of a Woman Pioneer

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Excerpt from Life of a Woman Pioneer: As Illustrated in the Life of Elsie Strawn Armstrong, 1789-1871 This little volume was inspired over sixty years ago, when, as a boy of from ten to fifteen years old I was very much impressed by the accounts my grandmother, Elsie Strawn Armstrong, recited to me from time to time of her early life in pioneer days of Pennsylvania, Ohio and Illinois. She called her stanzas poetry and I supposed they ranked well with those of Longfellow and Whittier. I was impressed too, with her ability to recall her lines verbatim if given a word or two to start off on any event of her life story. I also soon learned after she came to live at my father's home that if I wished to play on the grass I must find a place remote from the house, for if seen on the lawn in front of her window, there would be a tap, tap on the glass and I would have to go to her room and sew carpet rags or thread, what seemed to me, a hundred needles. My father instructed me that I must wait on her and run errands for her whenever needed and that seemed to me to be most of the time. Nevertheless I recognized that she was deserving of attention for she was nearly blind when she first came to live with us in 1861, so I served her as cheerfully as a boy of that age could be expected to do. I kept her wood-box filled with firewood, carried out the ashes and worst of all, I had to pull out her stumps of eye-lashes as often as they were long enough to be grasped by the tweezers. I do not recall whether it was her suggestion or my own, that some time, I should publish her rhymes so that her book might be sold in the shops as other books of poetry were. At any rate I carried that intention in mind several years. At last when a complete type-written copy of all her rhymes was prepared by one of my brothers, I thought I would now begin the long deferred task and prepare a copy for the printer, but I soon saw that to correct her English would destroy the rhythm and rhymes. I spent some time trying to do the impossible and then gave it up for another series of years. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully, any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.