“If these are rejected, I believe I’ll take up commercial writing.”
But both stories were accepted. Miss Abbott says that she owes her success as a fictioneer, therefore, to _Lippincott’s Magazine_ and the _Smart Set_ quite as much as to anything else.
As readers will have suspected, Miss Abbott is a member of the family which has attained distinction in letters and theology both. She is a daughter of the Rev. Edward Abbott, sometime editor of the _Literary World_ of Boston; a niece of Dr. Lyman Abbott, editor of the _Outlook_ and Henry Ward Beecher’s successor at Plymouth Church, Brooklyn; and a granddaughter of the Jacob Abbott who wrote the Rollo books for boys.
Miss Abbott’s father was born in Farmington, Maine, and was graduated from New York University in 1860, seven years after his brother, Lyman Abbott, matriculated at the same institution. Edward Abbott studied theology at the Andover Theological Seminary and served as pastor of the Pilgrim Congregational Church at Cambridge, Massachusetts. From 1869 to 1878 he was editor of the _Congregationalist_; afterward he became editor of the _Literary World_. He was ordained a minister of the Episcopal church in 1879 and served as rector of St. James’s Church, Cambridge, until 1896. Like his father, Jacob Abbott, Edward Abbott wrote some juvenile books as well as several histories and biographies.
Eleanor Hallowell Abbott was born in Cambridge in 1872. Largely educated by private tutors, she was for a short time a student in the public schools and afterward a special student at Radcliffe. She was a child exceedingly fond of outdoor life. Although she remembers kind and patient teachers she can recall no day when the walls of a schoolroom did not fret and torment her with the sense of physical confinement.
“The one or two things I understood at all I learned so quickly that it drove me almost crazy waiting for the fifty or more classmates to catch up--and the great many things I didn’t understand I was too frightened to learn in such a crowd. I can’t look upon little, playful, day-dreaming, high-strung children shut up in an ironbound schoolroom without experiencing a very large lump in my throat.”
At the Harvard grammar school in Cambridge her teachers first discovered the Abbott talent in her surprising fondness for English composition, a subject not customarily dear to the hearts of schoolchildren, and in her rapturous delight in reading aloud Washington Irving’s _Sketch Book_.