ut of print, I will put together a short sketch which will
give you some idea of what an interesting and attractive person she
was.

The father of Mrs. Sherwood--or, to give her her maiden name, Mary
Butt--was a clergyman. He had a beautiful country living called
Stanford, in Worcestershire, not far from Malvern, where Mary was born
on May 6, 1775. She had one brother, a year older than herself, and a
sister several years younger, whose name was Lucy.

Mary Butt's childhood, in her beautiful country home, was very happy.
She was extremely tall for her age, strong and vigorous, with glowing
cheeks and dark eyes and "very long hair of a bright auburn," which she
tells us her mother had great pleasure in arranging. She and her
brother Marten were both beautiful children; but no one thought Mary at
all clever, or fancied what a mark she would make in the world by her
writings.

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