ook, a _Linnet's Life_,
being tenderly cared for all her days. _Aesop's Fables_ were read and
re-read. At this time a neighbor had loaned one of the Waverley novels
to the older sister, who returned it before Mary Ann had finished
it. Distressed at this break in the story, she began to write out as
nearly as she could remember, the whole volume for herself. Her amazed
family re-borrowed the book, and the child was happy. The mother
sometimes protested against the use of so many candles for night
reading, and rightly feared that her eyes would be spoiled.

At the next school, at Coventry, Mary Ann so surpassed her comrades
that they stood in awe of her, but managed to overcome this when
a basket of dainties came in from the country home. In 1836 the
excellent mother died. Mary Ann wrote to a friend in after life, "I
began at sixteen to be acquainted with the unspeakable grief of a last
parting, in the death of my mother." In the following spring Chrissy
was married, and after a good cry with her brother over this breaking
up of the home circle, Mary Ann took upon herself the household
duties, and became the care-taker instead of the school-girl. Although
so young she took a leading part in the benevolent work of the
neighborhood.

Her love for books increased. She engaged a well-known teacher to come
from Coventry and give her lessons in French, German, and Italian,
while another helped her in music, of which she was passionately fond.
Later, she studied Greek, Latin, Spanish, and Hebrew. Shut up in
the farm-house, hungering for knowledge, she applied herself with
a persistency and earnestness that by-and-by were to bear their
legitimate fruit. That she felt the privation of a collegiate course
is undoubted. She says in _Daniel Deronda_: "You may try, but you can
never imagine what it is to have a man's force of genius in you, and
yet to suffer the slavery of being a girl."

She did not neglect her household duties. One of her hands, which
were noticeable for their beauty of shape, was broader than the other,
which, she used to say with some pride, was owing to the butter
and cheese she had made. At twenty she was reading the _Life of
Wilberforce_, Josephus' _History of the Jews_, Spenser's _Faery Queen,
Don Quixote_, Milton, Bacon, Mrs. Somerville's _Connection of the
Physical Sciences_, and Wordsworth. The latter was always an especial
favorite, and his life, by Frederick Myers in the _Men of Letters_
series, was o