with imaginary people.
Wherever I saw a few ashes in a glade, left by those who burnt sticks
to sell the ashes to assist in the coarse washings in farmhouses, I
fixed a hoard of gipsies and made long stories. If I could discern
fairy rings, which abounded in those woods, they gave me another set of
images; and I had imaginary hermits in every hollow of the rocky sides
of the dingle, and imaginary castles on every height; whilst the church
and churchyard supplied me with more ghosts and apparitions than I
dared to tell of." Mary and her stories must have been better worth
having than a whole library of "fairy-books."

One source from which Mary drew her tales was a collection of old
volumes which her father had bought at a sale and to which her mother
had given up a room over the pantry and storeroom. Mr. Butt made Mary
his librarian; and she revelled in old romances, such as Sir Philip
Sydney's _Arcadia_, and in illustrated books of travel; spending many
hours on a high stool in the bookroom, among "moths, dust, and black
calf-skin," studying these treasures.

One more glimpse must be given of those happy child-days, and we will
have it in Mary's own words: "I grew so rapidly in my childhood, that
at thirteen I had obtained my full height, which is considered above
the usual standard of women. I stooped very much when thus growing. As
my mother always dressed me like a child in a pinafore, I must
certainly have been a very extraordinary sort of personage, and
everyone cried out on seeing me as one that was to be a giantess. As my
only little friend of about my own age was small and delicate, I was
very often thoroughly abashed at my appearance; and therefore never was
I so happy as when I was out of sight of visitors in my own beloved
woods of Stanford. In those sweet woods I had many little embowered
corners, which no one knew but myself; and there, when my daily tasks
were done, I used to fly with a book and enjoy myself in places where I
could hear the cooing of doves, the note of the blackbird, and the rush
of two waterfalls coming from two sides of the valley and meeting
within the range where I might stroll undisturbed by anyone. It must be
noticed that I never made these excursions without carrying a huge
wooden doll with me, which I generally slung with a string round my
waist under my pinafore, as I was thought by the neighbours too big to
like a doll. My sister, as a child, had not good health, and therefore