ne, representing a rickety house with broken windows, a
crooked weed-grown path leading up to a gate fallen off the hinges,
and a fence with half the pickets off, she labelled "The Drunkard's
Home." Then she drew a companion picture of a neat farmhouse with a
straight path, and fence and gate all in apple-pie order, which she
called "The Reformed Drunkard's Home." These two drawings she
presented at a public meeting to Doctor Thompson, the leader of the
movement. Fifty years afterwards she met Mrs. Thompson, who said she
still had the pictures and thought them "very beautiful."

In spite of her indifference to study she was very precocious, and
learned to read at what was considered by her parents' friends as an
objectionably early age. Her father was very proud of the
accomplishments of his little daughter, and liked to show her off
before his friends, who, to speak the truth, looked with extreme
disfavour upon the performance. Once Mr. Page Chapman, editor of a
newspaper, put her through an examination on some subjects about which
she had been reading in _Familiar Science_, a work arranged in the
form of questions and answers. He asked: "What is the shape of the
world?" "Round," she replied. "Then why don't we fall off?" he asked,
and she answered: "Because of the attraction of gravitation." "This is
awful," he said, in horror at such precocity.

Her father had a taste for verse, and often when walking with his
children would recite a favourite poem, more, evidently, for his own
amusement than theirs. Of this Fanny writes: "He used to declaim so
often, in a loud, solemn voice, 'My name is Norval--on the Grampian
Hills my father feeds his flocks,' that I naturally received the
impression that these flocks and hills were part of my paternal
grandfather's estate. Years afterwards when I was travelling in
Scotland and asked the name of some hills I saw in the distance, I
felt a mental shock when told they were the Grampian Hills."

As I have said before, there was no discipline in the Van de Grift
household, and though the neighbours predicted dire results from such
a method of bringing up a family, one result, at least, was that every
one of Jacob Van de Grift's children adored him, and none more
whole-heartedly than his eldest born. She writes of him:

"My father was a splendid horseman and excelled in all athletic
things. He had such immense shoulders and such a deep chest, though
his hands and feet were remarkably