and made no farther inquiries. The paper continued to vanish, and the child was often observed with pen and ink, still sedulously shunning observation. At last her mother, on seeing her make a blank book, asked what she was going to do with it. Lucretia blushed, and left the room without replying. This sharpened her mother's curiosity; she watched the child narrowly, and saw that she made quantities of these little books, and that she was disturbed by observation; and if one of the family requested to see them, she would burst into tears, and run away to hide her secret treasure.
The mystery remained unexplained till she was six years old, when her mother, in exploring a closet rarely opened, found, behind piles of linen, a parcel of papers which proved to be Lucretia's manuscript books. At first the hieroglyphics seemed to baffle investigation. On one side of the leaf was an artfully sketched picture; on the other, Roman letters, some placed upright, others horizontally, obliquely, or backwards, not formed into words, nor spaced in any mode. Both parents pored over them till they ascertained the letters were poetical explanations, in metre and rhyme, of the picture on the reverse. The little books were carefully put away as literary curiosities. Not long after this, Lucretia came running to her mother, painfully agitated, her face covered with her hands, and tears trickling down between her slender fingers. "O mamma! mamma!" she cried, sobbing, "how could you treat me so? You have not used me well! My little books! you have shown them to papa—Anne—Eliza; I know you have, O; what shall I do?" Her mother pleaded guilty, and
