"For I am sick and capable of fears,
Oppressed with wrong, and therefore full of fears;"
and, knowing the necessity of relaxing a mind so highly wrought, he took good care that she should not be without healthy childish reading. We have an amusing picture of her consoling herself with fairy tales, when exiled, for her restlessness, to the foot of her sister's bed; and one of the first copies of Rosamond, and Harry and Lucy found its way to Marjorie Fleming, with Sir Walter Scott's name written on the fly-leaf.
Fairy tales, and Harry and Lucy! But the real, old-fashioned, earnest, half-sombre fairy tales of our youth have slipped from the hands of children into those of folk-lore students, who are busy explaining all their flavor out of them; while as for Miss Edgeworth, the little people of to-day cannot be persuaded that she is not dull and prosy. Yet what keen pleasure have her stories given to generations of boys and girls, who in their time have grown to be clever men and women! Hear what Miss Thackeray, that loving student of children and of childish ways, has to record about them. "When I look back," she writes,
