nestly like,
either it will be very painful to him to return them, or he will print
them for papa's sake, and not for their own. So I have made up my mind
to take my chance fairly with the unknown volunteers."

Perhaps it requires an editor's experience of the profoundly
unreasonable grounds on which he is often urged to accept unsuitable
articles--such as having been to school with the writer's husband's
brother-in-law, or having lent an alpenstock in Switzerland to the
writer's wife's nephew, when that interesting stranger had broken his
own--fully to appreciate the delicacy and the self-respect of this
resolution.

Some verses by Miss Procter had been published in the "Book of Beauty,"
ten years before she became Miss Berwick. With the exception of two
poems in the "Cornhill Magazine," two in "Good Words," and others in a
little book called "A Chaplet of Verses," (issued in 1862 for the
benefit of a Night Refuge,) her published writings first appeared in
"Household Words" or "All the Year Round."

Miss Procter was born in Bedford Square, London, on the 30th of October,
1825. Her love of poetry was conspicuous at so early an age, that I have
before me a tiny album, made of small note-paper, into which her
favorite passages were copied for her by her mother's hand before she
herself could write. It looks as if she had carried it about, as another
little girl might have carried a doll. She soon displayed a remarkable
memory and great quickness of apprehension. When she was quite a young
child, she learned with facility several of the problems of Euclid. As
she grew older, she acquired the French, Italian, and German languages,
became a clever piano-forte player, and showed a true taste and
sentiment in drawing. But as soon as she had completely vanquished the
difficulties of any one branch of study, it was her way to lose interest
in it and pass to another. While her mental resources were being
trained, it was not at all suspected in her family that she had any gift
of authorship, or any ambition to become a writer. Her father had no
idea of her having ever attempted to turn a rhyme, until her first
little poem saw the light in print.

When she attained to womanhood, she had read an extraordinary number of
books, and throughout her life she was always largely adding to the
number. In 1853 she went to Turin and its neighborhood, on a visit to
her aunt, a Roman Catholic lady. As Miss Procter had herself professed
the