She wrote verses at the age of nine, but it was the direct influence of her brother-in-law, Asahel Stearns, a professor of law, and of the notable people who gathered about him and her sister, which elevated her taste for literature and rendered it absorbing.

[4] Some of her purely outdoor work shows her genuine love of nature; while in her versified story, "Entranced", her narrative power stood out, and her "Austin's Painting of Christ" revealed the true devotional bent of her mind.

There can be no such persons as Margaret and Macwood; while as for Maureen and her brother Donnard, it is not in human nature that a delicate and reticent girl should suddenly break out into such hysterical ravings, or that a boy so coarse and inconsiderate should, by an abrupt change, become a self-sacrificing, high-toned "Roman Catholic clergyman."

The variety of themes sufficiently testifies to the versatility of the fancy, the breadth and sincerity of the feeling, and the sympathetic quality of the rhythmical expression.

It is both a quaint and a dainty book, whose contents will find numerous appreciative readera that will receive only the quietest of influences from them into receptive hearts.

Writing verses for children sounds like a very easy task, but in reality, it is sufficiently difficult to alarm the most confident poet.

It requires the dainty touch of a Frank Dempster Sherman, the bizarre originality of a Lewis Carroll, or the delicious naïveté and naturalness of a James Whitcomb Riley, really to reach tile child heart; and when we turn from such work as theirs to Mrs. Veeder's "Beggars," we shudder.

It is a story in verse of a lost child and her dog Doo-doo, and the kind lady who finds them says with infinite pathos: It is sometimes a little difficult to catch exactly the drift of Mrs. Veeder's words in the other poems also, as when she says: