s, was the
direct result of the perseverance and intelligence of Eliza Lucas, the
girl planter of the eighteenth century. Let the girls of our day look to
their laurels if they wish to be enrolled in the same class with this
indomitable little maid of South Carolina!

LADY JANE GREY:

The Nine Days Queen

IN all England there was no more picturesquely beautiful estate than
that at Bradgate in Leicestershire, belonging to Henry, Marquis of
Dorset, the father of Lady Jane Grey. There Lady Jane was born in 1537,
in the great brick house on a hill, called Bradgate Manor, which
overlooked acres of rolling lawns, long stretches of woodland and
extensive gardens, making a vast playground, and one which might well
have contented a less resourceful person than Lady Jane.

As it was, she was utterly unlike her two sisters, Mary and Katherine,
being a precocious child, fonder of books than of play, and doubtless
was less rugged in after years than if she had romped through meadow and
marsh as they did, or waded in the clear brook that babbled its way
through the woodland depths of Bradgate forests. Instead, while the
other girls ran races, or played some boisterous game of childhood, we
have glimpses of demure little Jane, even then as pretty as a doll in
her quaint dress, fashioned on the model of that worn by her own mother,
either sitting quietly in the house, so absorbed in her book that friend
or foe might have approached unnoticed, or on the velvety lawn
surrounding the Manor House, intent on some dry treatise, far above the
understanding of an ordinary child, looking up now and then to glance
off at the wonderful view spread out below her--a view so extensive that
it overlooked seven counties of England.

There, at beautiful Bradgate, Lady Jane spent the first seven years of
her life, busy with the endless resources at her command, and studying
with her sisters under the instruction of the Reverend Mr. Harding, who
was the chaplain of Bradgate--after the custom of those days--and it was
he who laid the firm foundation of that devotion to the Protestant
religion which was so strongly marked in Lady Jane's after life.

Until Jane was seven years old she did not accompany her parents on
their many visits to relatives of noble blood, or when they went to
Court, for she was considered too small for that until she was eight
years old, when she was occasionally taken with her family to London or
elsewhere. Lady Fran