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older in the orphan house in Cambridge, Reverend Hezekiah Study, now well into his seventies, took notice of her bright mind and insisted, against tradition, that she be given a full education of the type given to boys. Of course it was out of the question for her to enroll at Harvard College, for that school was devoted to training ministers. But she was allowed to sit on a stool in the corridor outside any classroom she wanted, and overhear whatever portion of the lesson was given loudly enough. And they let her have access to the library.

She soon learned that the library was the better teacher, for the authors of the books were helpless to shut her out because of her sex. Having put their best knowledge into print, they had to endure the ignominy of having a woman read it and understand it. The living professors, on the contrary, took notice of when Purity was listening, and most of them used that occasion to speak very quietly, to close the door, or to speak in Latin or Greek, which the students presumably spoke and Purity was presumed not to understand at all. On the contrary, she read Latin and Greek with great fluency and pronounced it better than all but a few of the male students - how else would she have come to the notice of a traditionalist like Reverend Study? - but she began to learn that the professors were rarely as coherent, deep, or penetrating in their thought as the authors of the books.

There were exceptions. Young Waldo Emerson, who had only just graduated from Harvard himself, would have brought her right into his classroom if she had not refused. As it was, she heard every word of his teaching quite clearly, and while he was prone to epigrams as a substitute for analysis, his enthusiasm for the life of the mind was contagious and exhilarating. She knew that Emerson cared much more about being thought to be erudite than actually thinking deeply - his "philosophy" seemed to consist of anything that would be particularly annoying to the powers that be without being so shocking that they would fire him. He got the reputation among the students as an original and a rebel without having to pay the penalty for actually being either.

It was not from Emerson, therefore, but from the library that Purity made the next leap toward understanding the meaning of her name and what it told her about her parents' lives. For it was in a treatise, "On the Care of Offspring of Witches and Heretics," by Cotton Mather that she first came to understand why she was an orphan bearing a Netticut name in a Massachusetts house.

"All children being born equally tainted with original sin from Adam," he wrote, "and the children of fallen parents being therefore not more tainted than the children of the elect, it is unjust to exact from them penalties other than those that naturally accrue to childhood, viz. subjection to authority, ignorance, inclination to disobedience, frequent punishment for inattention, etc." Purity read this passage with delight, for after all the constant implication that the children of the orphanage clearly were not as likely to be elect as children growing up with parents who were members of the churches, it was a relief to hear no less an authority than the great Cotton Mather declare that it was unjust to treat one child differently from any other.

So she was quite excited when she read the next sentence, and almost failed to notice its significance. "To give the children the best chance to avoid the posthumous influence of their parents and the suspicion of their neighbors, however, their removal from the parish, even the colony, of their birth would be the wisest course."

And the clincher, several sentences later: "Their family name should be taken from them, for it is a disgrace, but let not their baptismal name be changed, for that name cometh unto them from and in the name of Christ, however unworthy might have been the parents who proffered them up for christening."

I am named Purity, she thought. A Netticut name, but I am in Massachusetts. My parents are dead.

Hanged as witches or burned as heretics. And more likely, witches, for the most common heresy is Quakerism and then I would not be named Purity, while a witch would try to conceal what he was and would therefore name his children as his