n an opportunity of displaying them.
"When I was a very little child," she writes, "I used to amuse myself
and my brothers with inventing stories such as I had read. Having, as I
suppose, naturally a restless mind and busy imagination, this soon
became the chief pleasure of my life. Unfortunately my brothers were
always fond of encouraging this propensity, and I found in Taylor, my
maid, a still greater tempter. I had not known there was any harm in it,
until Miss Shore" (a Calvinistic governess), "finding it out, lectured
me severely, and told me it was wicked. From that time forth I
considered that to invent a story of any kind was a sin. But the desire
to do so was too deeply rooted in my affections to be resisted in my own
strength," (she was at this time nine years of age), "and unfortunately
I knew neither my corruption nor my weakness, nor did I know where to
gain strength. The longing to invent stories grew with a violence;
everything I heard or read became food for my distemper. The simplicity
of truth was not sufficient for me; I must needs embroider imagination
upon it, and the folly, vanity and wickedness which disgraced my heart,
are more than I am able to express. Even now (at the age of
twenty-nine), though watched, prayed and striven against, this is still
the sin which most easily besets me. It has hindered my prayers and
prevented my improvement, and therefore has humbled me very much." It is
narrated of the well-known Father Healy that a young lady having
consulted him as to the sin of vanity, she feeling convinced, when she
looked in her glass, that she was a very pretty girl, was answered by
him, "My child, that is not a sin; it is a mistake!" It wanted some wise
adviser to make the same remark to this poor tortured and deluded woman.

Illness under this code was always a punishment sent from heaven, as,
indeed, it may be; but, "if anyone was ill it showed that 'the Lord's
hand was extended in chastisement,' and much prayer was poured forth in
order that it might be explained to the sufferer, or to his relations,
in what he or they had sinned. People would, for instance, go on living
over a cesspool, working themselves up into an agony to discover how
they had incurred the displeasure of the Lord, but never moving away."
One last instance, the most remarkable of all, and we may leave this
book. It need hardly be said that a father of the kind depicted in this
book would have a holy horror of the Cath