ISABELLA BIRD, who afterwards became famous as a traveller, was the daughter of a clergyman. She was born in 1831, and spent her childhood in a country village in Cheshire of which her father was vicar. She was a frail, delicate child, and as it was good for her to be as much in the open air as possible, her father used to put her on a cushion before him when he rode round his parish. As soon as she was old enough, she rode a horse of her own, going with her father wherever he went. He made her notice everything they passed by the way, and questioned her about all that she saw. In after years she looked back to these early days as having taught her to be perfectly at home on a horse, to observe accurately everything that she saw, to love the flowers and the plants and to know their names and uses, to measure distances with her eye, and to watch the signs of the seasons. She was educated by her mother, and said that no one could teach as her mother did, since she made everything so wonderfully interesting. By the time she was seven, Isabella was an eager reader of books of all kinds, even of serious history. When she was eleven, her father moved to a parish in Birmingham, and there she soon became a keen Sunday school teacher and worker in the parish; later, her father again had a country living in Huntingdonshire. Isabella was not strong, and the doctor recommended a sea-voyage; so when she was twenty-three, she made her first journey, going to Canada and America. She wrote such interesting letters home describing all that she saw that her father urged her to make a book out of them, and soon after she came home her first book, “The Englishwoman in America” appeared, and it was much praised.