d been perfect, broke about the
time of the author's first remembrance due to typhoid fever contracted
after nursing three of her children through it. She lived for several
years, but with continual suffering, amounting at times to positive
torture.

So it happened, that led by impulse and aided by an escape from the
training given her sisters, instead of "sitting on a cushion and sewing
a fine seam"--the threads of the fabric had to be counted and just so
many allowed to each stitch!--this youngest child of a numerous
household spent her waking hours with the wild. She followed her father
and the boys afield, and when tired out slept on their coats in fence
corners, often awaking with shy creatures peering into her face. She
wandered where she pleased, amusing herself with birds, flowers,
insects, and plays she invented. "By the day," writes the author, "I
trotted from one object which attracted me to another, singing a little
song of made-up phrases about everything I saw while I waded catching
fish, chasing butterflies over clover fields, or following a bird with
a hair in its beak; much of the time I carried the inevitable baby for
a woman-child, frequently improvised from an ear of corn in the silk,
wrapped in catalpa leaf blankets."

She had a corner of the garden under a big Bartlett pear tree for her
very own, and each spring she began by planting radishes and lettuce
when the gardening was done; and before these had time to sprout she
set the same beds full of spring flowers, and so followed out the
season. She made special pets of the birds, locating nest after nest,
and immediately projecting herself into the daily life of the
occupants. "No one," she says, "ever taught me more than that the birds
were useful, a gift of God for our protection from insect pests on
fruit and crops; and a gift of Grace in their beauty and music, things
to be rigidly protected. From this cue I evolved the idea myself that I
must be extremely careful, for had not my father tied a 'kerchief over
my mouth when he lifted me for a peep into the nest of the
humming-bird, and did he not walk softly and whisper when he approached
the spot? So I stepped lightly, made no noise, and watched until I knew
what a mother bird fed her young before I began dropping bugs, worms,
crumbs, and fruit into little red mouths that opened at my tap on the
nest quite as readily as at the touch of the feet of the mother bird."

In the nature of this chil