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Show Ill with the exception of Mary, who chooses to walk home. Next morning by the time Ellis arrives, Mary has the washing nearly done. More planting and cultivation continue, more cool, rainy days pass, the weather having the double benefit of being favorable to the garden and affording Ellis a few opportunities to write. It is Sunday, May 16, 1875, as she makes her last journal entry until November 10, almost four months later. There is a single, undated short paragraph, probably inserted later as a bridge: The months of August and September were spent in the City canning fruit. The fourth of October Maggie left us for Philadelphia for the purpose of studying medicine. In four weeks she returned. Her loneliness and homesickness were so great she could not endure the separation.8 Of this, another reference provides a bit of illumination: On October 4, 1875, Maggie Shipp left the home for the Women's College in Philadelphia to study medicine and surgery. It had been agreed that the family at home would keep her informed by letter about the welfare of the children. During the first month no word whatever was received from home. Her loneliness and homesickness were so great she could not endure the separation from her nine-month-old baby daughter.9 Hard work and a sense of purpose, accompanied by an unusual amount of serenity, has caused Ellis to feel that she has, in the sylvan setting of the Sugar House farm, "scope for every faculty and attribute." This in no way prepares us to find her, at her next journal entry, "moving swiftly along in the cars" to attend Medical College in Philadelphia. We may surmise that Maggie's fees have been paid and that someone needs to take her place. Ellis, in her later autobiography, |