Young as she was, she had read all sorts of things before she had left home. She seems to have learned to read, as some children will, who grow up among books, almost unconsciously, and she made herself free of her father’s library in the most complete manner. Charles Lamb’s recipe for producing “incomparable old maids” had been tried in her case with extraordinary results. Like “Cousin Bridget” in _Mackery End_, “she was tumbled early, by accident or design, into a spacious closet of good old English reading, and browsed at will upon that fair and wholesome pasturage.” The plan may be all that Charles Lamb claims for producing “incomparable old maids,” but its effects on children are more questionable. Fortunately Marjorie seems to have got nothing worse from it than a vocabulary and stock of phrases that seem a little beyond her control, and a tremendous interest in romance, which cousin Isa has to keep in check. She is constantly losing her heart, now to “a sailer” who called here to say farewell; “it must be dreadful to leave his native country where he might get a wife and perhaps me, for I love him very much and with all my heart, but O I forgot Isabella forbid me to speak about love.” Again to Mr. Crakey, with whom she “walked to Crakyhall hand in hand in Innocence and metitation sweet thinking on the kind love which flows in our tender hearted mind which is overflowing with majestick pleasure.” And yet again to “Philip Caddie, who paid no little attention to me, he took my hand and led me downstairs and shook my hand cordialy.” But indeed it was a very innocent kind of romance, and Cousin Isa need not have been alarmed, for Marjorie’s “own true love” was Cousin Isa herself. Indeed once she has got away from the jargon of books—Kotzebue’s _Pigeon and Fawny Rachel_ and _The Cottage Cook_, we hear no more of her as a “loveress” except it be of “swine, geese, cocks, and turkeys that made Ravelston so pleasant to me, indeed they are the delight of my heart.” She had not been long in Edinburgh when she wrote to tell her sister all about it. The occasion was one of much solemnity, for, as she observes, “this is the first time I ever wrote a letter in my life.” In this letter she tells of the girls who play with her in the square, “and they cry just like a pig when we are under the painful necessity of putting it to death.” She draws a rather unflattering portrait of a certain Miss Potune, “a lady of my acquaintance,” and this in spite of the fact that “she praises me dreadfully.” “I repeated something out of Dean Swift, and she said I was fit for the stage, and you may think I was primmed up with majestick pride, but upon my word I felt myself turn a little birsay.” Perhaps she felt that Miss Potune was only trying to flatter her, just as she was doing with Aunt Keith. “This horrid fat simpliton says that my aunt is beautiful, which is entirely impossible, for that is not her nature.”