She Took A Quite Wonderful Interest In The Life Of The Little Community, And Would Always Be Where Others Were, Especially When Any Gathering Took Place.

Thus, long before I knew her at the age of four, she made the discovery that the village children, or most of them, passed much of their time in school, and to school she accordingly resolved to go.

Her parents opposed, and talked seriously to her and used force to restrain her, but she overcame them in the end, and to the school they had to take her, where she was refused admission on account of her tender years. But she had resolved to go, and go she would; she laid siege to the schoolmistress, to the vicar, who told me how day after day she would come to the door of the vicarage, and the parlour-maid would come rushing into his study to announce, "Miss Mab to speak to you Sir," and how he would talk seriously to her, and then tell her to run home to her mother and be a good child. But it was all in vain, and in the end, because of her importunity or sweetness, he had to admit her.

When I went, during school hours, to give a talk to the children, there I found Mab, one of the forty, sitting with her book, which told her nothing, in her little hands. She listened to the talk with an appearance of interest, although understanding nothing, her bugloss eyes on me, encouraging me with a very sweet smile, whenever I looked her way.

It was the same about attending church. Her parents went to one service on Sundays; she insisted on going to all three, and would sit and stand and kneel, book in hand, as if taking a part in it all, but always when you looked at her, her eyes would meet yours and the sweet smile would come to her lips.

I had been told by her mother that Mab would not have dolls and toys, and this fact, recalled at an opportune moment, revealed to me her secret mind - her baby philosophy. We, the inhabitants of the village, grown-ups and children as well as the domestic animals, were her playmates and playthings, so that she was independent of sham blue-eyed babies made of sawdust and cotton and inanimate fluffy Teddy-bears; she was in possession of the real thing! The cottages, streets, the church and school, the fields and rocks and hills and sea and sky were all contained in her nursery or playground; and we, her fellow-beings, were all occupied from morn to night in an endless complicated game, which varied from day to day according to the weather and time of year, and had many beautiful surprises. She didn't understand it all, but was determined to be in it and get all the fun she could out of it. This mental attitude came out strikingly one day when we had a funeral - always a feast to the villagers; that is to say, an emotional feast; and on this occasion the circumstances made the ceremony a peculiarly impressive one.

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