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Oh, night, thy soothing prophecies companion all our ways,

Until releasing hands let fall the catalogue of days.

These lines and the meditation from which they spring were the spontaneous phrasing and the natural meditation of—a child of ten. That in itself, I think, is sufficiently remarkable.

In the darkness who would cavil at the question of a line,

Since the darkness holds all loveliness beyond the mere design.

Strange insight for a comparative infant!

In her lighter moments—and, naturally, there are a great many—Nathalia’s “heart is all a-flutter like the washing on the line”; she “could not stain romance with monetary fee”; and, when she has sat upon a bumble-bee, she knows “the tenseness of humiliating pain.” Many a grown humorist might envy the freshness of such amusing phrase.

There is much laughter and nonsense in this book—that of a rather romantic little girl with a quick eye and ear and a pert fancy. But there is, as I have intimated, more than that.

Cloud-made mountains towered