Mrs. Davis tells some interesting anecdotes of the little girl's precocity, which I repeat in her own words. "When Winnie was very small,--I think three years old,--her father was reading aloud to me an essay on the refusal of a tomb to Byron in Westminster Abbey. The nurse took her up to carry her to bed and she called out: 'Oh, do leave me until I hear the rest. The English will regret refusing their great man a grave in their church;' showing she had comprehended the whole paper. Another time, when she was five years old, she was asked: 'For what was Abraham blessed?' 'For the manifestation of faith in hospitality,' she answered. No one had told her in this phrase, for I was her only teacher. At this same time she chanced to be at a church meeting, waiting for me and heard us talking of the minister's needs. For six months afterward she saved up her little pennies and one day tipped up behind him and put them into his hand, which was behind his back, saying: 'Dear Doctor, buy everything you want,--here is the money.' She asked questions which it taxed our mind and ingenuity to answer, and reasoned out her own theories and adjusted facts so as to suit her own ideas of right and justice. She could never become reconciled to the fatted calf being killed for the prodigal son, and sympathized passionately with the dutiful son who came from the field overtired with labor in his father's service to hear sounds of revelry in honor of the prodigal son, while he had never been given a fatted calf with which to entertain his friends." The father took great pride in the development of his younger daughter's bright mind. He and Mrs. Davis were her first teachers and introduced her to the immortal writers that they knew best. Before she could read she knew 'The Wreck of the Hesperus,' 'The Fight at Coilantogle Ford,' and Allan-Bane's song in the dungeon of Stirling castle, and had the Bible at her tongue's end. At the age of twelve she knew by heart also many striking passages from Shakespeare and was an ardent admirer of the 'Wizard of the North.' In 1877 she was placed in a boarding school at Karlsruhe, Germany, where she remained five years. The mental and moral discipline maintained by the Protestant sisterhood that directed the school was of the strictest kind; the life was as secluded and as free from gaiety and frivolity as that of a convent. In 1882 Miss Davis went to Paris, where she studied French several months, and afterwards traveled extensively.