children in the grandmother's care and enjoy her liberty when it pleased
her to roam abroad. The young lady had an indomitable will, and when she
decided to do a thing nothing would turn her aside. She found a favorite
resting-place on a pile of blankets in a dark attic room. This being
disapproved of by the elders, the door was kept carefully closed. She
then found entrance through a stove-pipe hole, high up on the wall of an
adjoining room. A cover was hung over the hole. She sprang up and
knocked it off. Then, as a last resort, the hole was papered over like
the wall-paper of the room. She looked, made a leap, and crashed through
the paper with as merry an air as a circus-rider through his papered
hoop. She had a habit of manoeuvring to be shut out of doors at
bed-time, and then, when all was still, climbing up to my window by
means of a porch over a door beneath it, to pass the night on my bed. In
some alterations of the house, the porch was taken away. She looked with
dismay for a moment at the destruction of her ladder, then calmly ran up
the side of the house to my window, which she always after continued to
do.

"Next in importance, perhaps, is my present intimate companion, now ten
years old and absolutely deaf, so that we communicate with signs. If I
want to attract his attention I step on the floor: if to go to his
dinner, I show him a certain blue plate: to call him in at night, I take
a lantern outside the door, and the flash of light attracts his
attention from a great distance. On one occasion he lived nine months
alone in the house while I made a trip to Europe, absolutely refusing
all the neighbors' invitations to enter any other house. A friend's
gardener brought him his daily rations. As warm weather came, he spent
his days in the fields, returning in the night for his food, so that at
my return it was two or three days before he discovered that the house
was open. The third evening he entered the open door, looked wildly