Mary Anne was considered delicate in her youth, and it was feared she was in consumption. On this account she was kept on a low diet—an astonishing treatment, to our modern notions. But the treatment seems to have been successful; for in her hale and hearty old age she could remark in her humorous way: “I have been a long time consuming away.” She was an active child, and she used to tell her grandnieces with much pride how she accomplished the feat of hopping on one leg right across High Street three times without stopping. The school routine of a little Belfast maiden in the latter decades of the eighteenth century was not unlike that with which the entertaining journal of Anna Greene Winslow, a small Boston schoolgirl contemporary, makes us familiar. There was a separate school for English, another for writing; in addition girls had to attend a sewing and knitting school. In all these branches Mary became very proficient. Her needlework was exquisite. She was fond of reading, and read only the best authors. Her letters, some of which will be quoted in due course, are admirable. One wishes, as one reads them and those of Elizabeth and Jane Emmet and Matilda Tone, that the delightful art were revived by the teachers of the girls of to-day. Captain John McCracken, being a travelled man and an admirer of the French nation, wished to have his children taught French. Belfast of that day supplied, it would appear, no better teacher than an old French weaver who had picked up his knowledge of English on the banks of the Lagan, and thought it the correct thing to translate his native tongue into the idiom of that classic region. Mary Anne used to relate afterwards, with great enjoyment that his translation of _il faut_ always took the form, “_it be to be_.” When Mary was in her teens the family left the house in High Street and went to a larger one in Rosemary Street. Two of the boys, William and John, married, but the family circle was not thus broken up for they brought their brides to live under the paternal roof in the patriarchal fashion of the period. So numerous were the inmates of the McCracken home, after a time, that their friends referred to it as “Noah’s Ark,” the appropriateness of the name being emphasised by the number of dogs, and cats, and other pet animals, who shared with the humans, the domicile.