It was her ambition to become as athletic as a boy, and she was persevering in all physical exercises--and throw stones very straight and far, with a quite easy masculine sweep of the arm; I taught her myself. It was also her ambition to draw, and she would sit for an hour or more on a high stool by her father, or on the arm of his chair, and watch him at his work in silence. Then she would get herself paper and pencil, and try and do likewise; but discouragement would overtake her, and she would have to give it up in despair, with a heavy sigh and a clouded look on her lovely little pale face; and yet they were surprisingly clever, these attempts of hers. Then she took to dictating a novel to her sisters and to me: it was all about an immense dog and three naughty boys, who were awful dunces at school and ran away to sea, dog and all; and performed heroic deeds in Central Africa, and grew up there, "booted and bearded, and burnt to a brick!" and never married or fell in love, or stooped to any nonsense of that kind. This novel, begun in the handwriting of all of us, and continued in her own, remained unfinished; and the precious MS. is now in my possession. I have read it oftener than any other novel, French or English, except, perhaps, _Vanity Fair_! I may say that I had something to do with the development of her literary faculty, as I read many good books to her before she could read quite comfortably for herself: _Evenings at Home_, _The Swiss Family Robinson_, _Gulliver_, _Robinson Crusoe_, books by Ballantyne, Marryat, Mayne Reid, Jules Verne, etc., and _Treasure Island_, _Tom Sawyer_, _Huckleberry Finn_, _The Wreck of the Grosvenor_, and then her father's books, or some of them. But even better than her famous novel were the stories she improvised to me in a small boat which I often rowed up-stream while she steered--one story, in particular, that had no end; she would take it up at any time. She had imagined a world where all trees and flowers and vegetation (and some birds) were the size they are now; but men and beasts no bigger than Lilliputians, with houses and churches and buildings to match--and a family called Josselin living in a beautiful house called Marsfield, as big as a piano organ. Endless were the adventures by flood and field of these little people: in the huge forest and on the gigantic river which it took them nearly an hour to cross in a steam-launch when the wind was high, or riding trained carrier-pigeons to distant counties, and the coasts of Normandy, Brittany, and Picardy, where everything was on a similar scale. It would astonish me to find how vivid and real she could make these imaginations of hers, and to me how fascinating--oddly enough she reserved them for me only, and told no one else.