If Alice was an extraordinary girl, she was not aware of it; nor
had she ever understood that her life was being shaped by
extraordinary conditions. Of course it could not but be plain to
her that she knew more and felt more than the girls of her narrow
acquaintance; that her accomplishments were greater; that she
nursed splendid dreams of which they could have no proper
comprehension, but until now she had never even dimly realized
that she was probably capable of being something more than a mere
creole lass, the foster daughter of Gaspard Roussillon, trader in
pelts and furs. Even her most romantic visions had never taken the
form of personal desire, or ambition in its most nebulous stage;
they had simply pleased her fresh and natural fancy and served to
gild the hardness and crudeness of her life,--that was all.
Her experiences had been almost too terrible for belief, viewed at
our distance from them; she had passed through scenes of
incredible horror and suffering, but her nature had not been
chilled, stunted or hardened. In body and in temper her
development had been sound and beautiful. It was even thus that
our great-grandmothers triumphed over adversity, hardship,
indescribable danger. We cannot say that the strong, lithe, happy-
hearted Alice of old Vincennes was the only one of her kind. Few
of us who have inherited the faded portraits of our revolutionary
forbears can doubt that beauty, wit and great lovableness
flourished in the cabins of pioneers all the way from the Edisto
to the Licking, from the Connecticut to the Wabash.
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