into type in some small shop where she could set part of it herself, pull her own proofs, learn more about proof-reading by correcting them, and see the whole thing through to the binding of a small armful of copies for her friends.
But before anything of that sort was done I wanted her to have the practice of revising her first copy as carefully as possible and putting it into strictly printable condition—as, indeed, she was eager to do. Accordingly she took it away with her in the summer, worked on it from early July through September in the intervals of swimming, canoeing, mountain-climbing, and plain day-dreaming, and brought it back, on the 5th of October, 1923, ready for print. Twenty-four hours later we left it in a burning building from which nothing got out but the lucky human occupants.
***
From the point of view of an admittedly fond parent—for I can make no slightest pretension to the ability to contemplate all this with a stranger's or a critic's detachment—it was heart-rending to watch the nine-year-old author torture her memory to the end of reconstituting the tale in its first shape. There were, during the next weeks, a
