There was a strange pleasant mixture of sweet fretfulness and trusting appeal in her.  Children suffer less because they feel that all is right when father or mother is with them; grown people from whom this faith has vanished ere it has led them to its original fact, may well be miserable in their sicknesses.

She lay moaning one night in her crib, when suddenly she opened her eyes and saw her mother’s hand pressed to her forehead.  She was imitative, like most children, and had some very old-fashioned ways of speech.

‘Have you got a headache, madam?’ she asked.

‘Yes, my Molly,’ answered her mother.

’Then you will go to mother Mary.  She will take you on her knee, madam.  Mothers is for headaches.  Oh me! my headache, madam!’

The poor mother turned away.  It was more than she could bear alone.  Dorothy entered the room, and she rose and left it, that she might go to mother Mary as the child had said.

Dorothy’s cares were divided between the duties of naiad and nursemaid, for the child clung to her as to no one else except her mother.  The thing that pleased her best was to see the two whale-like spouts rise suddenly from the nostrils of the great white horse, curve away from each other aloft in the air, and fall back into the basin on each side of him.  ‘See horse spout,’ she would say moanfully; and that instant, if Dorothy was not present, a messenger would be despatched to her.  On a bright day this would happen repeatedly.  For the sake of renewing her delight, the instant she turned from it, satisfied for the moment, the fountain ceased to play, and the horse remained spoutless, awaiting the revival of the darling’s desire; for she was not content to see him spouting:  she must see him spout.  Then again she would be carried forth to the verge of the marble basin, and gazing up at the rearing animal would say, in a tone daintily wavering betwixt entreaty and command, ‘Spout, horse, spout,’ and Dorothy, looking down from the far-off summit of the tower, and distinguishing by the attitude of the child the moment when she uttered her desire, would instantly, with one turn of her hand, send the captive water shooting down its dark channel to reascend in sunny freedom.

If little Mary Somerset was counted a strange child, the wisdom with which she was wise is no more unnatural because few possess it, than the death of such is premature because they are yet children.  They are small fruits whose ripening has outstripped their growth.  Of such there are some who, by the hot-house assiduities of their friends, heating them with sulphurous stoves, and watering them with subacid solutions, ripen into insufferable prigs.  For them and for their families it is well that Death the gardener should speedily remove them into the open air.  But there are others who, ripening from natural, that is divine causes and influences, are the daintiest little men and women, gentle in the utmost peevishness of their lassitude, generous to share the gifts they most prize, and divinely childlike in their repentances.  Their falling from the stalk is but the passing from the arms of their mothers into those of—­God knows whom—­which is more than enough.