Mary was a dreamy, thoughtful child, full of fancies and imaginings. She loved to sit on the stairs, listening to her mother's voice singing sweetly in her dressing-room to her guitar. She had wonderful fancies about an echo which the children discovered in the hilly grounds round the rectory. Echo she believed to be a beautiful winged boy; "and I longed to see him, though I knew it was in vain to attempt to pursue him to his haunts; neither was Echo the only unseen being who filled my imagination." Her mother used to tell her and Marten stories in the dusk of winter evenings; one of those stories she tells again for other children in the _Fairchild Family_. It is the tale of the old lady who was so fond of inviting children to spend a day with her. The first grand event of Mary's life was a journey taken to Lichfield, to stay with her grandfather, old Dr. Butt, at his house called Pipe Grange. She was then not quite four years old. Dr. Butt had been a friend, in former days, of Maria Edgeworth, who wrote the _Parents' Assistant_ and other delightful stories; of Mr. Day, author of _Sandford and Merton_; and other clever people then living at Lichfield. He knew the great actor, David Garrick, too, who used to come there to see his brother; and the famous Dr. Samuel Johnson, who had been born and brought up at Lichfield. But to little Mary, scarcely more than a baby, these things were not of much interest. What she recollected of her grandfather was his present to her, on her fourth birthday, of "a doll with a paper hoop and wig of real flax." And her memories of Pipe Grange were of walks with her brother and nurse in green lanes; of lovely commons and old farmhouses, with walls covered with ivy and yew-trees cut in grotesque forms; of "feeding some little birds in a hedge, and coming one day and finding the nest and birds gone, which was a great grief to me." Soon afterwards the nursery party at Stanford was increased by two little cousins, Henry and Margaret Sherwood. They had lost their mother, and were sent to be for a time under the care of their aunt, Mrs. Butt. They joined in the romps of Marten and Mary, and very lively romps they seem to have been. Mary describes how her brother used to put her in a drawer and kick it down the nursery stairs; how he heaped chairs and tables one on the other, set her at the top of them, and then threw them all down; how he put a bridle round her neck and drove her about with a whip. "But," she says, "being a very hardy child, and not easily hurt, I suppose I had myself to blame for some of his excesses; for with all this he was the kindest of brothers to me, and I loved him very, very much."