myth, and enveloped it in an atmosphere of
warmth and joyousness. She led him into nature's realm, that his
imagination might plume its wings for greater flights by its efforts to
interpret the heart of things that live. Thus his imagination learned to
traverse space, to explore sights and sounds his senses could not reach,
and to construct for him another world of beauty and delight.

So, too, with the other spiritual qualities. Upon these goals her gaze was
fixed and she gently led him toward them. She taught the arithmetic with
zest, with large understanding, and in a masterly way, for she was causing
it to serve a high purpose. Whatever study she found helpful, this she
used as a means with gratitude and gladness. If she found the book ill
adapted to her purpose, she sought or wrote another. If pictures proved
more potent than books, the galleries obeyed the magic of her skill and
yielded forth their treasures. She yearned to have her pupil win the goals
before him; everything was grist that came to her mill if only it would
serve her purpose. She disdained nothing that could afford nourishment to
the spirit of the child and give him zeal, courage, and strength for the
upward journey. If more arithmetic was needful, she found it; if more
history, she gave it; and if the book on geography was inadequate, she
supplemented from libraries or from her own abundant storehouse of
knowledge. She dared to deviate from the course of study, if thereby the
child might more certainly win the goals toward which she ever looked and
worked.

In the boy, she saw a poet, a philosopher, a prophet, an artist, a
musician, a statesman, or a philanthropist, and she worked and prayed that
the artist in the child might not die but that he might grow to stalwart
manhood to glorify the work of her school. In each girl she saw another
Ruth, or Esther, or Cordelia, or Clara Barton, or Frances Willard, or
Florence Nightingale, or Rosa Bonheur, or Mrs. Stowe, or Mrs. Browning.
And her heart yearned over each

Martha Finley (1828 - 1909) was a teacher and author of numerous works, the most well known being the 28 volume Elsie Dinsmore series which was published over a span of 38 years. The daughter of Presbyterian minister Dr. James Brown Finley and his wife and cousin Maria Theresa Brown Finley, she was born on April 26th, 1828 in Chillicothe, Ohio. Finley wrote many of her books under the psodonym Martha Farquharson. She died in 1909 in Elkton, Maryland, where she moved in 1876.

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