all-day picnics in the lovely
country round Charmouth, Auntie our merriest playfellow. Never was a
healthier home, physically and mentally, made for young things than in
that quiet village. And then the delight of the holidays! The pride of
my mother at the good report of her darling's progress, and the renewal
of acquaintance with every nook and corner in the dear old house and
garden.

The dreamy tendency in the child, that on its worldly side is fancy,
imagination, on its religious side is the germ of mysticism, and I
believe it to be far more common than many people think. But the
remorseless materialism of the day--not the philosophic materialism of
the few, but the religious materialism of the many--crushes out all the
delicate buddings forth of the childish thought, and bandages the eyes
that might otherwise see. At first the child does not distinguish
between what it "sees" and what it "fancies"; the one is as real, as
objective, to it as the other, and it will talk to and play with its
dream-comrades as merrily as with children like itself. As a child, I
myself very much preferred the former, and never knew what it was to be
lonely. But clumsy grown-ups come along and tramp right through the
dream-garden, and crush the dream-flowers, and push the dream-children
aside, and then say, in their loud, harsh voices--not soft and singable
like the dream-voices--"You must not tell such naughty stories, Miss
Annie; you give me the shivers, and your mamma will be very vexed with
you." But this tendency in me was too strong to be stifled, and it
found its food in the fairy tales I loved, and in the religious
allegories that I found yet more entrancing. How or when I learned to
read, I do not know, for I cannot remember the time when a book was not
a delight. At five years of age I must have read easily, for I remember
being often unswathed from a delightful curtain, in which I used to
roll myself with a book, and told to "go and play," while I was still a
five-years'-old dot. And I had a habit of losing myself so completely
in the book that my name might be called in the room where I was, and I
never hear it, so that I used to be blamed for wilfully hiding myself,
when I had simply been away in fairyland, or lying trembling beneath
some friendly cabbage-leaf as a giant went by.

I was between seven and eight years of age when I first came across
some children's allegories of a religious kind, and a very little
later ca