“Cousin Charles Storer” seems to have been interested in the little girl’s reading. He lends her “Gulliver’s Travels abreviated,” which “Aunt says I may read for the sake of perfecting myself in reading a variety of composures.” With her “nihil obstat” Aunt Deming slips in an incidental lesson on “literary history.” “She sais farther that the piece was desin’d as a burlesque upon the times in which it was wrote, and Martimas Scriblensis and Pope Dunciad were wrote with the same design and as parts of the same work, tho’ wrote by three several hands.” Later on, Aunt Storer lent her three of cousin Charles’ books to read, “viz., The puzzeling cap,[18] the female Oraters, and the History of Gaffer too-shoes.” She got the “History of Joseph Andrews abreviated” for a New Year’s Gift, and began “Sir Charles Grandison”—whether she ever finished it or not. The works of Fielding and Samuel Richardson “abreviated” seem to have been favourite books for children, and figure in booksellers’ lists of the period as suitable for the “Instruction and Amusement of all good Boys and Girls,” together with “The Brother Gift, or the Naughty Girl Reformed”; “The Sister Gift, or the Naughty Boy Reformed,” and “Mr. Winlove’s Moral Lectures.” Compared with Hélène, who read the best literature of the day, under the careful eye of Madame de Rochechouart, and was saturated in the masterpieces of Corneille and Racine from her theatrical triumphs, poor Anna’s literary pabulum seems very thin stuff indeed. In 1773, Anna’s parents came from Nova Scotia to live in Marshfield, and their little daughter left Aunt Deming’s house to return to them. At this date, the diary therefore comes to an end. She lived to hear of some of the greatest battles of the War of the Revolution, and must have been rather puzzled which side to pray for, seeing her own family divided on the question. But soon she was beyond all earthly troubles, for she died of consumption in 1779. [Illustration] PAMELA AT BELLECHASSE The Schooldays of Lady Edward Fitzgerald “Pale, pretty Pamela!” So charming a picture she makes, in her husband’s letters to his mother, as she sits in the window by the garden of Kildare Lodge, daintily stitching for her baby; or out in the garden (while _he_ sits in the window) “busy in her little American jacket planting sweet pea and mignonette”; or in stately Leinster House, making for him a point of light in its gloom, of comfort in its loneliness, with her baby in her arms, “her sweet, pale, delicate face bending over it, and the pretty look she gives it,” that our hearts are hers for all time. Even the sordid story of the after years cannot alienate them from her. For us, in Ireland, whatever France may have done with her during the hard and pitiless “twenties” of the nineteenth century, she lives for ever, set by her husband’s love in an atmosphere of eternal youth, of eternal romance—lovely and pale, and sweet—Lord Edward’s girl-wife.