typed out a fair copy of the whole—the copy from which this little book is set.
To what extent is this twelve-year-old manuscript identical with the nine-year-old story? To a far greater extent, I am sure, than seems compatible with the huge number of hours spent on it since it was completed ; for it happens that a disproportionate number of those hours has gone into laborious, at times unconscious, recovery of the precise effects which were in the lost original. The differences are not where a stranger to the author would naturally look for them: that is, in the diction and the build of sentences. Barbara's vocabulary at nine was, of course, a stratified arrangement of deposits from Walter de la Mare[1] and George Macdonald,[1] W. H. Hudson[1] and Mark Twain, Shelley and Scott; that is to say, it was just what it is now except for the later addition of words which could not be in this story anyhow—the words of history, of science. And certainly the fundamental ideas and emotions of the story have undergone no change. The fact is, it was conceived and written at the end of a phase which could not return—that phase of normal childhood in which
