ustrating them and between times doing a bit of writing
herself. Can't you see the pencils flying? Can't you see three little
pink tongues sticking out from between three pairs of purposeful lips
and wriggling in time to the pencils? Can't you see the small brows
furrowed with thought? And the proud parents? And the startled
nursemaid?

To my mind the very finest thing about Miss Daisy Ashford's present book
is the opportunity it gives us, reading it, to follow the growth of her
genius for observation. For surely the faculty to observe and, having
observed, to set down in words the results of that observation is a
genius. It is more than that, it is two phases of genius harmoniously
coupled.

At the age of eight, as we shall note, she begins her career as a writer
by knowing very little of certain phases of life largely dealt with by
older writers; and this little she knows by reason of what she has read
or by reason of what she has heard read. Rapidly, though, she progresses
to the point where, along with these borrowed second-hand impressions,
she incorporates impressions which are all her own. Reading what she
wrote in the first year of her authorship, we can figure, approximately,
when she learned her first French word; when to her there came those
vague appreciations of the Roman Catholic faith which are so fascinating
to the children of non-Catholics--or perhaps the Ashford family were
Romanists. Influenced by these alluring ecclesiastical mysteries, we
find her causing a prospective bridegroom to address the Rev. Father
Fanty as "your kindness" and begging the reverend gentleman "to excuse
my craving for matrimony." Through these pages one sees how travel
broadened the young person's fund of experience, which in her favored
case meant her fund of material, for unlike many writers, old enough to
know better, little Miss Ashford was, by the virtue of a miraculous
intuition, inspired to write, sometimes at least, of things that she
actually knew about, rather than to deal exclusively with topics which
other writers before her had professed to know about. Early in her
opening story she speaks of "Cracknels." Reading this word, my memory
ran back to my own childhood when we knew but three standard varieties
of crackers--soda-crackers, animal crackers and cracknels which last
were round, slickish objects rather like glazed oak-galls, somewhat
dusty to the taste and warranted to create a tremendous thirst for
licorice