se of the nineteenth
century,--little beings allowed greater liberties, and burdened with
heavier accountabilities, than where there are more to divide both.
There are several incidents told of her childhood, not particularly
remarkable, perhaps, but showing that her mind and her imagination were
alive. She was not by any means a precocious child; her mind was but
little, if at all, in advance of her years. If one may judge from
detached anecdotes and descriptions, she showed no more than the
receptivity and quickness natural to a bright and somewhat unusually
clear intellect. Through all these anecdotes there runs a vein denoting
what is less common in childhood than a certain precocity,--a keen sense
of justice. She appears to have reasoned of many things, usually taken
by childhood for granted, and assented to their results only if they
seemed to her childishness just. If after life showed her that the
affairs of this life can be but seldom regulated according to the ideas
of finite justice, she never seems to have lost a certain fairness of
judgment and opinion, which is rare in one of her sex and circumstances.
When five years old, her mother, wishing her to give up a pet doll to a
little crippled friend, told her that sympathy should suggest her doing
it; that it was a privilege to make another happy; that it was
selfishness to prefer her own pleasure of possession to that of another.
But Mary listened unmoved to these arguments. Nevertheless the struggle
was not a long one. With a good grace, after a few moments of silence,
she carried the doll to her unfortunate friend. "Mamma," she said
soberly, "she shall have it, for it is right that she should. I feel it.
I shall have many things that she can never have."

For the logic of five years it was no small thing to have settled this
question in this way. It would take too much time and too much space to
dwell on the anecdotes of her childhood. Indeed, the biographer does not
linger on them long himself.

"It is meet," he says, "to speak of these early Years, not from a desire
to show that there was aught in the Childhood of Mary Twining remarkable
or unnatural, that should be the Cause of Wonder or Admiration. But the
rather that there may be evinced the Presence, even in the Germ, of
certain Qualities of Soundness of Judgment and of Thoughtfulness unusual
in a Female, which grew with her Growth, and which were in later Years,
developed into stronger Traits by no