tail to run, belabored her through the orchard to the gap by which she had entered.

The conqueror returned to me, flushed, but unsmiling. I had Bud tight in my arms, and was laughing and crying together.

"It was funny to see you lam her and to see her run," I sobbed between giggles that hurt me more than the sobs.

She sat down on the grass, and clasped the baby to her heart. He cooed joyously, and held up a sweet open mouth for a kiss. He got, not one, but twenty kisses upon his wet lips, his pink face, his curly head, and the bonny eyes that were bluer than the sky. Then she bent to give me one—so long and tender that it checked sob and giggle.

"We will never make devil's race-horses fight again, Namesake. They have a right to their lives. And a life is a very precious thing!"

Chapter III

Van Diemen's Land

LEARNED to read that winter. How nobody knew, and I least of all. Looking backward, I seem to have gone to sleep one night, an ignoramus, and awakened next morning knowing letters, yet never having learned.

Cousin Molly Belle's solution of the puzzle submitted to her by my mystified mother was characteristic:—

"It is the fable of Munchausen's frozen horn over again. All the learning you have been pumping into the poor child for two years has thawed out. I always told you that she had brains if you would wait until they woke up."

I might speak of that enchanted season as my birth-winter. My mental awakening was into another world, so much wider and fuller than that with which I had been well content up to this time, that life was a continual ecstasy. I discovered, early in December, that, as Mr. Wegg was to immortalize himself by saying a quarter-century later—"all print was open" to me. By the middle of February I had gone three times through the inimitable classic, Cobwebs-to-catch-Flies, and read at least six other books through twice, besides being up to my eyes and over the head of my understanding in Sandford and Merton, that most fascinating of prosy impossibilities. Beside the classic I have named, and Rosamond, Harry and Lucy, Berquin's Children's Friend, Mrs. Sherwood's Little Henry and His Bearer and Fairchild Family, Anna Ross and Helen Maurice, we had no books that were written expressly for children. No prepared pap being at hand, we expressed real nourishment for the mind—relishful juices that made intellectual bone and muscle—from the strong meat upon which our elders fed.

Did we comprehend all, or one-third of what we read, or heard read?

Less, probably, than one-sixth, but we got far more than would seem credible to one who has been led up a graciously inclined plane of learning. Our manner of receiving and digesting mind-food was very much like Bud's way of testing unknown substances that might be edible. We rejected what hurt our teeth. What we got we kept.

The current of my outer life was quiet to apparent dulness. After breakfast Mary 'Liza and I had our lessons with my mother in "the chamber." In another year we would have a governess, but the mothers of that time always taught their children to read and write, to spell and cipher through Emerson's First Arithmetic. I have known several who never sent their boys and girls to school, even preparing the lads for college. We had our reading, beginning with a chapter in the Bible, then, our spelling and writing, and sums. After these, my mother read aloud from Grimshaw's History of England, simplifying the language when she considered it necessary, which was not often, while Mary 'Liza made up the first set of chemises (in the vernacular "shimmys,") she had undertaken for herself, and I knit twenty rounds on a stocking. My mother put in a "mark" of black silk every morning from which I could count the rounds upward. Mary 'Liza had knit a dozen pairs in all. In the tops of six, she had knit in openwork her initials "M. E. B." I had no ambitions in that direction. My views on the subject of ornamental initials and sampler autographs were put into pregnant English at a subsequent date by the elder Weller. He professed to have received at second-hand from the charity-boy, set to con the alphabet, what the retired stage-driver applied to matrimony—to wit, that it was not worth while to go through so much to get so little. Knitting delighted not me, nor stitching either.

Lessons and work over, the day began for me in joyful earnest. The rest of the morning and all the evening were mine to use, or abuse, as I liked. We applied "evening" to the hours between the three o'clock dinner and bedtime. We may have caught the phrase from our Bible readings. The morning and the evening were the day.

Early in the fall I had begged permission from my mother to utilize a deserted chicken-house as a play-room. It was long and narrow; one side was barred with upright slats that admitted light and air to the former inmates; one end was taken up by the door; the other and the back were solid boards, the house having been built in the angle of a fence. My mother had the interior cleaned and whitewashed. I think she was glad to provide a decent "den" for me nearer home than the Old Orchard and the more distant woods, and she was losing hold of her hope of making me into a pattern daughter. It gives me a twinge to recollect how thanklessly I accepted what must have been an act of self-denial on her part, perhaps even a compromise with conscience. Mam' Chloe—by my mother's orders, as I know now—hunted up some breadths of faded carpet in the garret, Uncle Ike beat the dust out of them, then nailed them up along the slatted side to keep the wind away. These I called my "arras," having picked up the word from hearing my father read Shakespeare aloud at night after we were in the trundle-bed. Other breadths covered the rough flooring, and I had a castle of which I was the undisputed mistress—a court where I reigned, a queen.

Enthroned in a backless chair, I was, by turns, Mrs. Burwell (my own mother), Helen Maurice's Aunt Felix, Rosamond's mother, Rebecca, the Lady Rowena (my father began Ivanhoe in January), Mrs. Fairchild, Deborah, Mrs. Murray of Anna Ross, Naomi, and Ophelia. Once, I "did" Job by wrapping a meal-sack—for sackcloth—about me, and, sitting upon the ground, throwing ashes over my head and into the air, the while four colored boys, previously instructed, burst in one by one, with news of the mischief wrought by Sabean, lightning, Chaldean, and cyclone. A dramatization of Queen Esther, upon which I had set my heart, was, at last, given up because I could not be King Ahasuerus and Queen Esther at one and the same time.

When the castle was too bleak for even child-comfort, Aunt 'Ritta, the cook, let us heat bricks in the kitchen fire, and showed us how to wrap them in rags to keep in the warmth. Clad in my red cloak, a wadded hood of the same color tied over my ears, and my feet upon a swathed brick, I was in no danger of taking cold.

Mary 'Liza put her neat little nose in at the door one raw day when she was walking for exercise, and wondered, gently, "how I could stand it."