School-Days in 1800 by Lucy Ellen Guernsey

HOW strange it seemed, that first evening at home! -so strange and yet so familiar. There was all the old furniture I knew so well, and the old faces, all less changed than I should have expected after a three years' absence. Mother had grown somewhat thin, and I saw gray threads in her hair, but her colour was good, and, on the whole, she looked better than when I left her. Jeanne too looked older and graver, and Ruth and Harry had grown almost out of my knowledge, though Ruth kept her baby face, and was, if anything, prettier than ever. As to Rose, she had come to that age after which coloured women never seem to change.

How much I had to tell and to hear! -As that Ezra had entered college in the Junior year, and expected to graduate this coming commencement, when he would go back to Lee for a while to study divinity with good Mr. Henderson. (That was the way divinity was usually studied in those days. After a young man had finished his college course he went to live with some clergyman, under whose direction he pursued his theological studies, and whom he helped in the work of the parish. Mr. Henderson had almost always one or two students with him when we lived in Lee. I don't think it was at all a bad plan.) Tom was still in Salisbury with his uncle, doing very well, and likely to become a partner in due time. Jeanne still had the school in the village. She had received the offer of a better place in the Dartmouth academy, but she would not leave mother, at least not till I came home. Ruth and Harry went to school, and Ruth had learned to spin, and had worked a magnificent sampler, which was to be framed. Father's farm was improving, and he had come out of the Albany business a great deal better than he expected, so that the family were once more in easy circumstances; but he liked Vermont, and had no notion of going back to Lee.