n a
different setting.

"Aunt Knodle was very neat and orderly, high-tempered and somewhat
domineering, but possessing a singular charm. Children liked to go to
her house even though they were made to be on their best behavior
while they were there. Everything in her house was in what we would
call good taste to-day. She had beautiful old china, fine silver, and
good furniture, everything rich and dark. The house was a long
rambling cottage, with a turn in it to match the irregular shape of
the lot. It had many gables and dormer windows, and the whole was
covered with creeping roses, and there was a faint sweet smell about
it that I think I would know now. The master of this delightful house,
Adam Knodle, was as near a saint on earth as a man can be; he was kind
to everybody and everything. He was extremely absent-minded, and his
wife liked to tell how he once killed a chicken for the family dinner
and threw away the chicken and brought in the head.

"My aunt was an ardent lover of animals, and abhorred cruelty to them
in any form. She had a dog named Ponto, an ugly ill-tempered little
black dog of no pedigree whatever, who ruled as king in that house. He
was accustomed to lie on a silk cushion in the window commanding the
best view. My aunt used to sit at one of the windows--not Ponto's, I
can tell you--ready, like Dickens's heroine, Betsy Trotwood, to pounce
out upon passing travellers. Sometimes, when she thought a horse was
being driven too fast, she rushed out and seized it by the bridle
while she read its driver a severe lecture."

As the years passed the young girl's restless energies found other
outlets. At school she was a brilliant but not an industrious pupil.
It was in composition that she shone especially, and one of her
schoolmates says of her: "She always wrote her compositions in such an
attractive way, weaving them into a story, so that the children were
eager to hear them."

While attending high school she became fired with the idea of writing
a book in conjunction with a friend, a beautiful Southern girl named
Lucy McCrae. The writing was done secretly, after school hours, on the
steps of the schoolhouse, while a third friend, Ella Hale,[3] kept
guard, for the whole thing was to be a profound secret until the world
should receive it as the wonder of the age. This great work was
brought to a sudden end by the illness of Lucy McCrae.

[Footnote 3: Now Mrs. Thaddeus Up de Graff, of El