ed the making of books as some occult art
practised by certain persons, mostly as dead and as distant as one
Shakespeare whose fame had faintly reached her.

But when there came into the unpretentious cottage across the road the
actual author of a printed book that lay on a table in the drawing-room;
and when this actual author was discovered on near view to be a rather
stout man with a shockingly bad hat and creases all over his linen
coats; and when the maid who dwelt in the same house with this actual
author testified, during the course of a gossip, that he was in no wise
different from other men--which is to say, he made no end of a fuss if
the toast was not to his liking and threw his burnt matches down
anywhere, and shouted angrily if there was no soap in the bathroom--why
then, when all these things were discovered, Anna simply walked up to
the store one fine afternoon and set herself up in the stock-in-trade of
an author, marvelling that it had never before occurred to her to write
a book.

But after she had done a very few chapters she craved a reading
audience. Blake the gardener, she determined, was too surly for this
office, and too sleepy; his day's work so near to Nature's heart and at
such an altitude made him nod by seven o'clock in the evening. And one
could hardly follow after him as he trundled about with his barrow in
the daytime and read aloud to him how it was discovered that the lovely
Annabell Deloitte, who was a nursery governess in a lord's family, had
been changed in the cradle and was really the Lady Florentine Trelawney.

And Miss Bibby, for all her gentleness, was too "stand-offish" for the
position of listener. Anna at once rejected any idea of asking that lady
to undertake the work.

But the children made a delightful audience and clamoured eagerly, the
moment they reached the foot of the waterfall, for the "book" to be
produced from the secret recesses of Anna's umbrella (in which it hid
itself from Miss Bibby's eyes), and for the enthralling woes of the Lady
Florentine Trelawney to be at once continued.

So it may be concluded that it was Anna who acted as the direct vehicle
for the transmission of the literary infection to the children
themselves.

The logic of the matter was very simple.

If Anna could write a book--Anna who was to be frequently seen with
black smuts from the stove all over her face; Anna who did not know that
the reign of William the Conqueror was 1066 to 108