When Mrs. Stowe was teaching in the Hartford School she was not without pupils that were full of mischief. One of these, being very fond of animals and bugs of all kinds, used to bring her favorites and install them in the desk, shutting down the wide cover as a door to their prison until she should get a chance to show them to her best-loved teacher, Miss Harriet Beecher, who could look unappalled into the desk with its nests of spiders or its families of toads, for there was not a creature that God could create that Harriet did not love. Nearly every novel that she ever wrote includes in its characters some favorite dog or cat; they were characters, too, for they were as different and as individual as people. Then there is her book called “Queer Little People,” where she tells tales about the Nutcracker family of Nutcracker Lodge, about _Tip-top_, _Toddy_, and _Speckle_ of the Robin family, about that fascinating _Hum_, son of _Buz_, the humming-bird that was blown in at the window on a chilly day at the seashore, about the _Squirrels_ that lived in a house, about the _Mrs. Magpie_ that put on such airs and could not be cut, and about all the congregation of _Carlos_ and _Rovers_ and _Princes_, including the wonderful high-bred _Giglio_ who was destined to an early demise, and the aristocratic Italian dog _Florence_ who as they were one day riding along through the streets of Rome barked a familiar greeting to the Pope. Aunt Esther’s wonderful power in telling stories about animals, nineteen in a row on rats only, seems to have been handed down to her clever niece. Well, this mischievous pupil at Hartford had one morning only one small katydid in her desk. It was very interesting in its fine dress of green and silver, with wings of point lace from Mother Nature’s finest web. It perked itself and stood up airily as if it knew that it was about to be immortalized in a human story. Harriet’s fancy saw the possibilities. She said to the student, “You write a story about it.” “I? Write a story? I couldn’t do it for my life.” “Yes, you can. Come; you write one and I will write one, too; then we will read them to each other.” Harriet wrote that story and the copy of it in her own hand is to-day one of the treasures of that same pupil. The tale was also published later in “Queer Little People.” Strangely enough this story may serve to prove what Harriet Beecher Stowe’s feeling was even in her early life on the great matter that she made the theme of her greatest book.