There is a remarkably nice little girl in that pleasant English novel, published a few years ago, _Sir Charles Danvers_—a little girl who can be safely recommended to all child-lovers, who will only wish they could hear a great deal more about her. Molly Danvers is not particularly precocious; she is not at all supersensitive, and we are not even told that she is pretty. There is absolutely no inventory given of her personal charms; and as to her clothes, “a white frock and two slim black legs” are casually mentioned on her first introduction, and we never hear another word about them. “A white frock and two slim black legs!” Could any description be more meagre? Imagine Little Saint Elizabeth, or Sara Crewe, reduced ruthlessly to a white frock, and not another allusion to their wardrobes in the whole course of their histories. But Molly doesn’t care. I have a suspicion that her white frocks don’t stay white very long, and that her slim black legs are better distinguished for activity than for grace. She is anything but heroic, and runs fleetly away from danger, leaving both her cousin and her donkey to their fate; but she has a loving little heart, nevertheless, and when her terrier dies, this heart is as nearly broken as a healthy little girl’s can be. “‘He is _dead_, Uncle Charles. He was quite well, and eating Albert biscuits with the dolls this morning, and now’—the rest was too dreadful, and Molly burst into a flood of tears, and burrowed with her head against the faithful waistcoat of Uncle Charles—of Uncle Charles, the friend, the consoler of all the ills that Molly had so far been heir to. “‘Vic had a very happy life, Molly,’ said Charles, pressing the little brown head against his cheek, and vaguely wondering what it would be like to have any one to turn to in time of trouble. “‘I always kept trouble from him except that time I shut him in the door,’ gasped Molly. ‘I never took him out in a string, and he only wore his collar—that collar you gave him that made him scratch so—on Sundays.’ “‘And he was not ill a long time? He did not suffer any pain?’ “‘No, Uncle Charles, not much. But, though he did not say anything, his face looked worse than screaming, and he passed away very stiff in his hind-legs. Oh!’ (with a fresh outburst) ‘when cook told me that her sister that was in a decline had gone, I never thought’ (sob, sob!) ‘poor Vic would be the next.’”