Childhood and Early Youth 19 ground of our memories, are our true bene- factors." Now that we have become acquainted with the environment in which Ellen Key was born and grew up, it remains for us to follow her through her simple and uneventful life—as far as external happenings go—^to try to find and comprehend her personality, as it shows itself in her work and in her writings, and to re- cognise inherited as well as acquired traits, influences of education, environment, and cir- cumstances. "I was born at Sundsholm, the eleventh of December, 1849, the first child of young and happy parents. " With these, her own words, Ellen Key lets us know she is a "love-child" in the most beautiful meaning of the word. The significance which she attaches to this fact, upheld in her view for that matter by well-known scientific authorities, is expressed in her Century of the Child, and doubtless her warm life-faith is due in some degree to the happy circumstance of her birth. The first story I ever heard of Ellen Key was that as a tiny little girl she defended her one-year-younger sister who was being scolded because she lay crying in her crib. Prompted by the same motherliness, which later brought