ts usefulness--but this does not
happen as often as one might expect it would. Indeed, it happens with an
infrequency which may be regarded as remarkable. As a child, Susy had
good fortune with her large words, and she employed many of them. She
made no more than her fair share of mistakes. Once when she thought
something very funny was going to happen (but it didn't), she was racked
and torn with laughter, by anticipation. But, apparently, she still felt
sure of her position, for she said, "If it had happened, I should have
been transformed [transported] with glee."

And earlier, when she was a little maid of five years, she informed a
visitor that she had been in a church only once, and that was the time
when Clara was "crucified" [christened]....

In Heidelberg, when Susy was six, she noticed that the Schloss gardens
were populous with snails creeping all about everywhere. One day she
found a new dish on her table and inquired concerning it, and learned
that it was made of snails. She was awed and impressed, and said:

"Wild ones, mamma?"

She was thoughtful and considerate of others--an acquired quality, no
doubt. No one seems to be born with it. One hot day, at home in
Hartford, when she was a little child, her mother borrowed her fan
several times (a Japanese one, value five cents), refreshed herself with
it a moment or two, then handed it back with a word of thanks. Susy knew
her mother would use the fan all the time if she could do it without
putting a deprivation upon its owner. She also knew that her mother
could not be persuaded to do that. A relief most be devised somehow;
Susy devised it. She got five cents out of her money-box and carried it
to Patrick, and asked him to take it down-town (a mile and a half) and
buy a Japanese fan and bring it home. He did it--and thus thoughtfully
and delicately was the exigency met and the mother's comfort secured. It
is to the child's credit that she did not save herself expense by
bringing down another and more costly kind of fan from up-stairs, but
was content to act upon the impression that her mother desired the
Japanese kind--content to accomplish the desire and stop with that,
without troubling about the wisdom or unwisdom of it.

Sometimes, while she was still a child, her speech fell into quaint and
strikingly expressive forms. Once--aged nine or ten--she came to her
mother's room, when her sister Jean was a baby, and said Jean was crying
in the nursery, and