(_English Literature Papers._) HOW many of my Pansies are acquainted with her? She is “a woman in a book,” and the book was written by a woman of whom you have surely heard—Elizabeth Barrett Browning. I want you to know something about this story book and its author. There are those who think the story is too “grown-up” to interest children; but that is because they do not understand certain kinds of children very well. When I was a little girl of ten, I was very fond of narrative poems, and read some which were judged far above my understanding. Would you like a picture of Aurora’s room, as she describes it? Listen: “I had a little chamber in the house As green as any privet hedge a bird Might choose to build in. . . . The walls were green, the carpet was pure green, The straight small bed was curtained greenly, And the folds hung green about the window, Which let in the out-door world with all its greenery. You could not push your head out and escape A dash of dawn-dew from the honeysuckle.” Poor Aurora lost her mother when she was four years old, and her dear, dear father when she was just a little girl. Then she sailed across the ocean from her home in Italy to her father’s old home in England. When she first saw English soil, this is the way she felt: . . . “oh, the frosty cliffs looked cold upon me! Could I find a home among those mean red houses, Through the fog?. . . Was this my father’s England? . . . . . . I think I see my father’s sister stand Upon the hall-step of her country house To give me welcome. She stood straight and calm, Her somewhat narrow forehead braided tight As if for taming accidental thoughts From possible quick pulses. Brown hair Pricked with gray by frigid use of life. A nose drawn sharply, yet in delicate lines; A close mild mouth . . . eyes of no color; Once they might have smiled, but never, never Have forgot themselves in smiling.” You cannot imagine, I think, any life more unlike what Aurora had been used to in her home in Florence, than the one to which she came in England. She describes her aunt’s life as— “A sort of cage-bird life, born in a cage, Accounting that to leap from perch to perch Was act and joy enough for any bird. Dear Heaven, how silly are the things That live in thickets, and eat berries! I, alas, a wild bird scarcely fledged, Was brought to her cage, and she was there to meet me. Very kind! ‘Bring the clean water; give out the fresh seed!’” You wonder what sort of a little girl she was? She tells us: