s by
Ballantyne, Marryat, Mayne Reid, Jules Verne, etc., and _Treasure
Island_, _Tom Sawyer_, _Huckleberry Finn_, _The Wreck of the
Grosvenor_, and then her father's books, or some of them.

But even better than her famous novel were the stories she
improvised to me in a small boat which I often rowed up-stream while
she steered--one story, in particular, that had no end; she would
take it up at any time.

She had imagined a world where all trees and flowers and vegetation
(and some birds) were the size they are now; but men and beasts no
bigger than Lilliputians, with houses and churches and buildings to
match--and a family called Josselin living in a beautiful house
called Marsfield, as big as a piano organ.

Endless were the adventures by flood and field of these little
people: in the huge forest and on the gigantic river which it took
them nearly an hour to cross in a steam-launch when the wind was
high, or riding trained carrier-pigeons to distant counties, and the
coasts of Normandy, Brittany, and Picardy, where everything was on a
similar scale.

It would astonish me to find how vivid and real she could make these
imaginations of hers, and to me how fascinating--oddly enough she
reserved them for me only, and told no one else.

There was always an immensely big strong man, one Bobby Maurice, a
good-natured giant, nearly three inches high and over two ounces in
weight, who among other feats would eat a whole pea at a sitting,
and hold out an acorn at arm's-length, and throw a pepper-corn over
two yards--which has remained the record.

Then, coming back down-stream, she would take the sculls and I the
tiller, and I would tell her (in French) all about our school
adventures at Brossard's and Bonzig, and the Lafertes, and the
Revolution of February; and in that way she picked up a lot of
useful and idiomatic Parisian which considerably astonished Fraeulein
Werner, the German governess, who yet knew French almost as well as
her own language--almost as well as Mr. Ollendorff himself.

She also changed one of the heroes in her famous novel, _Tommy
Holt_, into a French boy, and called him _Rapaud_!

She was even more devoted to animals than the rest of the family:
the beautiful Angora, Kitty, died when Marty was five, from an
abscess in her cheek, where she'd been bitten by a strange
bull-terrier; and Marty tearfully wrote her epitaph in a beautiful
round hand--

"Here lies Kitty, full of grace;
Di