It is in connection with this very church that we have a pleasant glimpse of the little Mary from the pen of Mrs. Sherwood, then a young girl living in Reading. “I remember,” she writes, “once going to a church in the town, which we did not usually attend, and being taken into Mrs. Mitford’s pew, where I saw the young authoress, Miss Mitford, then about four years old. Miss Mitford was standing on the seat, and so full of play that she set me on to laugh in a way which made me thoroughly ashamed.” Writing of this same period in after life, Mary Mitford says: “It is now about forty years since I, a damsel scarcely so high as the table on which I am writing, and somewhere about four years old, first became an inhabitant of Belford Regis” (her name for Reading), “and really I remember a great deal not worth remembering concerning the place, especially our own garden and a certain dell on the Bristol road to which I used to resort for primroses.” It was during this first residence in Reading, when she was still a small child, that she saw London for the first time. “Business called my father thither in the middle of July,” she writes, “and he suddenly announced his intention of driving me up in his gig (a high open carriage holding two persons), unencumbered by any other companion, male or female. George only, the old groom, was sent forward with a spare horse over-night to Maidenhead Bridge, and, the dear papa conforming to my nursery hours, we dined at Crauford Bridge ... and reached Hatchett’s Hotel, Piccadilly (the New White Horse Cellar of the old stage-coaches), early in the afternoon.... “I had enjoyed the drive past all expression, chattering all the way, and falling into no other mistakes than those common to larger people than myself of thinking that London began at Brentford, and wondering in Piccadilly when the crowd would go by; and I was so little tired when we arrived that, to lose no time, we betook ourselves that night to the Haymarket Theatre, the only one then open. I had been at plays in the country, in a barn in Hampshire ... but the country play was nothing to the London play—a lively comedy with the rich caste of those days—one of the comedies that George III enjoyed so heartily. I enjoyed it as much as he, and laughed and clapped my hands and danced on my father’s knee, and almost screamed with delight, so that a party in the same box, who had begun by being half angry at my restlessness, finished by being amused with my amusement. “The next day, my father, having an appointment at the Bank, took the opportunity of showing me St. Paul’s and the Tower.