"
This revelation of lineage, nevertheless, was an added incentive to
strive for higher things; an inheritance more enduring than our little
tin box and black silk stockings which had belonged to mother.
An almost indescribable joy was mine when, at a gathering of the
school children to do honor to the citizens who had inaugurated the
system of public instruction in Sacramento, I beheld on the platform
Captain John A. Sutter. Memories both painful and grateful were evoked.
It was he who had first sent food to the starving travellers in the
Sierra Nevada Mountains. It was he who had laid his hand on my head,
when a forlorn little waif at the Fort, tenderly saying, "Poor little
girl, I wish I could give back what you have lost!"
To me, Captain Sutter had long been the embodiment of all that was good
and grand; and now I longed to touch his hand and whisper to him
gratitude too sacred for strangers' ears. But the opportunity was
withheld until riper years.
During our last term at school, Georgia's health was so improved that
my life was more free of cares and aglow with fairer promises. Miss
Kate Robinson and I were rivals for school honors, and I studied as I
never had studied before, for in the history, physiology, and rhetoric
classes, she pressed me hard. At the close of the session the record
showed a tie. Neither of us would accept determination by lot, and we
respectfully asked the Honorable Board of Education to withhold the
medal for that year.
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