“We should not be happy at the death of our fellow creatures, for they love life like us love your neighbor & he will love you Bountifulness and Mercifulness are always rewarded. In my travels I met with a handsome lad named Charles Balfour Esge [Esqr.] and from him I got offers of marage--ofers of marage did I say? nay plainly [he] loved me. Goodness does not belong to the wicked but badness dishonor befals wickedness but not virtue, no disgrace befals virtue perciverence overcomes almost al difficulties no I am rong in saying almost I should say always as it is so perciverence is a virtue my Csosin says pacience is a cristain virtue, which is true.” She is not copying these profundities out of a book, she is getting them out of her memory; her spelling shows that the book is not before her. The easy and effortless flow of her talk is a marvelous thing in a baby of her age. Her interests are as wide and varied as a grown person’s: she discusses all sorts of books, and fearlessly delivers judgment upon them; she examines whomsoever crosses the field of her vision, and again delivers a verdict; she dips into religion and history, and even into politics; she takes a shy at the news of the day, and comments upon it; and now and then she drops into poetry--into rhyme, at any rate. Marjorie would not intentionally mislead anyone, but she has just been making a remark which moves me to hoist a danger-signal for the protection of the modern reader. It is this one: “_In my travels._” Naturally we are apt to clothe a word with its present-day meaning--the meaning we are used to, the meaning we are familiar with; and so--well, you get the idea: some words that are giants to-day were very small dwarfs a century ago, and if we are not careful to take that vast enlargement into account when we run across them in the literatures of the past, they are apt to convey to us a distinctly wrong impression. To-day, when a person says “_in my travels_” he means that he has been around the globe nineteen or twenty times, and we so understand him; and so, when Marjorie says it, it startles us for a moment, for it gives us the impression that _she_ has been around it fourteen or fifteen times; whereas, such is not at all the case. She has traveled prodigiously for _her_ day, but not for ours. She had “traveled,” altogether, three miles by land and eight by water--per ferryboat. She is fairly and justly proud of it, for it is the exact equivalent, in grandeur and impressiveness, in the case of a child of our day, to two trips across the Atlantic and a thousand miles by rail.